Re: New Internet Draft on registering IDNs

[Martin Duerst <duerst@xxxxxx>]

At 08:16 03/03/26 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:

> Right. Unfortunately, the current draft of the JET document is silent 
> about these requirements, and from talking to some JET members, I haven't 
> heard any good description of why Chinese needs both. In fact, I remember 
> many long conversations with CNNIC and TWNIC people a few years ago where 
> they all said that just blocking (with no allocating) was fine. Maybe 
> opinions in the Chinese language community have changed since then, but I 
> haven't seen any written down in the JET document yet. Maybe the next 
> version will cover this clearly.

This is just a wild guess, but it may have to do with the fact that
even in Taiwan, simplified characters are sometimes used. The
most often cited example is the 'tai' in Taiwan (U+53F0). This is
clearly a simplified character, but it is often used. While in
general, combinations of simplified and traditional variants
can just be blocked, this is a case where just blocking would not work.

> True, but it would only help a little bit. Telling the users what has been 
> done does not let them predict what will happen. If a registry says "we 
> have mapped these characters to these other ones for this language 
> reason", users will understand that; if a registry says "we have blocked 
> these characters for this language reason", users will understand that. 
> But I don't know how many users will understand "we have mapped some of 
> them but blocked other ones even though the language reason is the same". 
> If there is a good language reason for differentiating the two cases, that 
> would be wonderful.

'language reason' may be the same or different. It may be the same language,
but a different reason. Also, in some cases, it may appear very natural
to people understanding the language to read 'we have mapped A, B, and C,
and blocked D, E, and F'. A very simplistic example would be French,
with somebody registering e-acute. If the system replied 'we have
mapped e (without any accent) and blocked e-grave, e-circumflex,
and e-diaeresis, that would make sense to somebody understanding
French. The e without accent can be used as an equivalent for e-acute,
and is therefore mapped, but the other accented variants are never
equivalents, and may be blocked just because they would otherwise
interfere with the e without accent.
[I don't claim that this is the right thing to do for French.]

Regards,    Martin.