Subject: Re: [precis] [vip] Educational session on existing variant practices

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 25 Jul 2011 22:59:27 +0200

At 09:40 25/07/2011, Andrzej Bartosiewicz wrote:

>Sure. I will cover that...

Dear Andrzeij,

I am not sure this introduction covers the IDNA2008 context? We reach 
the IDNA2008 consensus due to the RFC 5895 draft, that was further on 
published for information only as it exemplifies one of the many 
possible ways to address many different real life problems including 
mapping, variants, etc. Also, you seem to consider variants only in 
the TLD and domain name context (without indicating the DNS options). 
However the problem also affects many other Internet protocols. The 
WG/PRECIS is chartered to help a solution to replace stringprep in 
these protocols.

Don't you think it would be advisable to present all these issues 
together? This might help a lot? RFC 1958 states: "If there are 
several ways of doing the same thing, choose one. If a previous 
design, in the Internet context or elsewhere, has successfully solved 
the same problem, choose the same solution unless there is a good 
technical reason not to.  Duplication of the same protocol 
functionality should be avoided as far as possible, without of course 
using this argument to reject improvements." So, whatever the 
technical solution, is there is one, should be the same.

Or do you think the variant/homograph problem should only be 
addressed as a general digital ecosystem scripting issue outside of 
the Internet context ? An Unicode extension as a script table able to 
cleanly support any entry without any risk of variant and homograph 
problem because it would be a graphcode only based upon the geometric 
graphic form. This would be really sympathetic to me as I think this 
is the only solution on the long range and that ccTLDs could easily 
contribute in sending a copy of every symbol they accept in a given 
script, based upon a common fount. I suppose people like ABBY could also help?

This field is very wide, isn't it? Lot of consideration ahead, I am afraid.
jfc

---

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:14:32 +0200

At 09:02 26/07/2011, Patrik Fältström wrote:

>On 26 jul 2011, at 08.55, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>
> > On 25 jul 2011, at 11.32, Andrzej Bartosiewicz wrote:
> >
> >> I have no problmem with "æ" and "ae"
> >
> > I do, they are two different things if you are a Swedish speaking.
> >
> > "æ" and "ä" on the other hand should be treated as the same.
> >
> > Which is something completely different than "lookalike" of course.
> >
> > Just to show the confusion.
>
>Let me add an explanation to the above.
>
>In English the "æ" is a ligature, and in some more languages. It is 
>a separate letter and *not* a ligature in the Scandinavian languages 
>that uses it.
>
>So whether something is a ligature, and because of that what is "the 
>same" is context dependent.
>
>    Patrik

In such a case, the solution seems to be to use a table where the 
visual geometric symbol æ can be freely used by people along their 
own orthotypography of their own language without caring about the 
ways other languages, cultures, typographies, orthotypographies. 
Either it is possible to bridge such a graphcode with unicode and we 
have to do it, or it is not and here is the problem we (VIP, PRECIS, 
IUCG, ...) have to address.

Best
jfc