--On Monday, October 21, 2013 15:37 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer
<bortzmeyer(_at_)nic(_dot_)fr> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 09:30:30AM -0400,
John C Klensin <john-ietf(_at_)jck(_dot_)com> wrote
a message of 19 lines which said:
Do you have any idea what Slide 8 is about?
No, I don't and that's one of the reasons I used the term
"troll". Pouzin often mentions "problems with Unicode" but he
never documented them in detail.
That was a lot of what caused me to wonder. I certainly know of
things I consider problems with Unicode, but they aren't with
scripts he is likely to be complaining about. We also know of
the issues that Jefsey and others have raised about majuscules,
but unless I've been misinformed, the relevant AFNOR coding
standards don't reflect the difference. So, whatever should or
should not be done about those issues, it is hard to blame them
on Unicode (at least if there wasn't a formal request from AFNOR
to Unicode to make the distinction that was dismissed or
rejected).
I've got the same reaction to "IDN technical restrictions". I'm
not aware of any significant ones unless one has a desire to
use, e.g., symbols, as domain name labels. And, as far as
"visual ambiguities" are concerned, I'd love to know what he
proposes because, despite lots of dancing around (and large
collections of committees and procedures where ICANN is
involved) the only really effective fixes I can imagine are to
not try to do IDNs (and also prohibit "0" and "1" from ASCII /
LDH domain names) or to discard the DNS in favor of some system
that would apply different matching rules in different parts of
the tree.
As Dave Crocker says, Louis is certainly no troll. That doesn't
prevent wondering about some of his comments sometimes.
Incidentally, I consider most of those slides to be distortions,
presumably in support of a rather specific agenda or at least
the result of a very different perspective on appropriate global
networking technology. That agenda isn't news (nor is the
"national networks connected by gateways" model and perspective)
and the slides should probably not be dignified by a reaction
from the IETF. But, when he says something that appears to be
substantive and relevant, I have enough respect for him and his
contributions to want to try to understand if there is anything
to it that we should be considering.
best,
john