Bruce Lilly <blilly(_at_)erols(_dot_)com> wrote:
So, for purposes of a document intended to be a standards-track
RFC, it seems quite clear that a newsgroup "name" is a name in
the RFC 1958 and RFC 2277 sense. It is therefore not subject to
internationalization,
Couldn't you say the same thing about domain names? They are protocol
elements without a doubt (in email addresses and URLs, for example).
Therefore they are not subject to internationalization, and the IDN
effort should never have begun in the first place? That argument can
be made, but given that IDNs have been approved, that sets a precedent
for a reinterpretation or reconsideration of whatever principle you are
invoking.
The difficulty here is that some identifiers are intended, from the
start, to be used by both machines and humans. Domain names and
newsgroup names both fall into that category.
Jean-Marc Desperrier <jean-marc(_dot_)desperrier(_at_)certplus(_dot_)com> wrote:
The ASCII in "case-independant ASCII" is an extremly important part.
When the name is not ASCII, the case-independance rules are ultimately
dependant on the locale used.
They can be. Unicode defines two case-folding operations, a default
one, and one for use with Turkish and Azeri. The only difference is the
dot on the letter i.
Case-independance for non-ASCII strings is a bad idea.
It a whole can of worms there.
It looks like a pretty small can to me. One letter in two languages.
For case mapping (as opposed to case folding), the SpecialCasing.txt
describes all the non-trivial mappings. Again the only locale-sensitive
mappings deal with the dot on the letter i, this time in three languages
(Lithuanian, Turkish, and Azeri).
People point to Turkish i as if it's just one example from a large
class, but as far as I can tell, it's the only one.
Do you know of What's the IETF policy here ? I haven't seen it
discussed yet.
Unicode specifies a caseless matching operation, and IDNs use it. See
UAX#21:
http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr21/
AMC