--On Sunday, 27 February, 2005 20:19 -0800 Erik van der Poel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> John C Klensin wrote: >> >> (i) ICANN is still assuming that this is a registry >> issue. As such, if someone else starts guessing at what >> a registry is doing, we may get into trouble, especially >> since the tables may not show all of the relevant >> registry rules and restrictions. > > Hmmm... GNU libidn already seems to be trying to use > machine-readable tables. I had a look at the GNU libidn page: > > http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/ > > It has a copy of an expired Internet Draft by Paul Hoffman: > > http://josefsson.org/cgi-bin/rfcmarkup?url=http://josefsson.or > g/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/*checkout*/libidn/doc/specifications/dra > ft-hoffman-idn-reg-02.txt > > This draft seems to be talking about bundling and blocking, > which your draft talks about too. What happened here? Did Paul > decide to let his expire? Yes. Paul more or less gave up (he can explain that decision; I won't try to do it for him), then generously consented to the inclusion of some of his text and definitions, and even more of his concepts, into my draft. A different way of looking at this is that we found our drafts converging and I got the short straw for producing a consolidated version and trying to walk it through the works. Paul gets considerable credit but bears no responsibility or blame, for the result, but I hope we still are in at least broad agreement. > Anyway, my only reason for trying to get machine-readable > tables was to figure out which Unicode character categories > were being used. Another way to get this info is to simply ask > the registries. Or, we can suggest a list of categories and > see if they would be happy with a nameprep-bis that limits the > characters to those categories. As has been pointed out in other contexts, this is probably a fool's errand. If a registry declines to register something, then is isn't present and there isn't much value in guessing whether a lookup fails because the name was not registered or because its registration was prohibited. Conversely, if a registry either has no rules or declines to follow the rules it does have, knowing what those rules were supposed to be is not terribly useful. If a browser wants to apply sanity checks before it attempts a DNS lookup, that is really a separate set of issues and constraints. And, again, knowing the rules a registry would have applied if its authority reached down more than a level or two probably isn't a big help. john
