Subject: Re: Unicode/10646 History (was Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC)

From: Kenneth Whistler <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2001 14:54:00 -0800 (PST)

Eric,

> I expected you to cite both the rejection of Klingon, without mentioning
> how much time was wasted on it, or Runic, Pharonic Egyptian, etc., and to
> make a "scholarly defense" of doing Pharonic Egyptian. These are artifical
> or dead languages.
> 
> RFC 1591 flatly notices the operators of ccTLDs that they "have a duty to
> serve the community."
> 
> I don't think that means dorking with glyphs Egypt, or from the Yucatan
> (although there are way more speakers of Mayan than of Pharonic Egyptian),

Something in the vicinity of 2,000,000 probably, but citing that
fact is about as relevant (or irrelevant) as pointing out that there are
approximately 60,000,000 Egyptians in Egypt, a significant number
of whom are as interested in their cultural heritage of hieroglyphs
as Mayans (and Mixe-Zoqueans and Aztecs and Zapotecs and ...) are
interested in their cultural heritage of hieroglyphs.

RFC 1591 also states:

"3) The designated manager must be equitable to all groups in the
domain that request domain names.

This means that the same rules are applied to all requests, all requests
must be processed in a non-discriminatory fashion, and academic
and commercial (and other) users are treated on an equal basis."

Once IDNs allow Unicode-based names, perhaps you might want to
recuse yourself from service as a domain name manager for
Sweden when the first academic group comes along requesting a
domain name containing runes.

--Ken

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2001 18:25:30 -0500

Ken,

> approximately 60,000,000 Egyptians in Egypt

Do you think they want bidi and Arabic first, or something else, say Pharonic
Egyptian?

My guess is bidi+Arabic. If the AINC guys and gals answer "Pharonic Egyptian
First", then I'm wrong. Let's ask 'em. They may have a sense of humor.

Equitability. Now there's a concept. Does it apply to groups that both want
ASCII and SJIS and want code-points 0x5c and 0x7e? You may want to ask some
NICers what this clause means in practice. They meet regionally and globally
and they may have a sense of humor also.

I may want to recuse myself from service as a domain name manager for Sweden...

Now that _is_ funny!

Eric