The IESG has approved the following document: - 'PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols' (draft-ietf-precis-framework-23.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Preparation and Comparison of Internationalized Strings Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Pete Resnick and Barry Leiba. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-framework/ Technical Summary Application protocols using Unicode characters in protocol strings need to properly prepare such strings in order to perform valid comparison operations (e.g., for purposes of authentication or authorization). This document defines a framework enabling application protocols to perform the preparation and comparison of internationalized strings ("PRECIS") in a way that depends on the properties of Unicode characters and thus is agile with respect to versions of Unicode. Working Group Summary The WG spent some time deciding how many classes need to be defined and what kind of class is suitable for "profiling" for different purposes. In particular the discussion of use of spaces in Identifier class took a bit of time. But the WG converged at the end. This document went through two IETF Last Calls and two IESG Evaluations. At the end of the first Last Call, concerns were raised regarding how the term "profiles" was being used in the context of this document. Additionally, a good deal of the text was copied in from IDNA instead of importing definitions. The IESG also had concerns about how the IANA registry was to be created. The document was updated to address these issues. Additionally, the WG changed the discussion Directionality to address review comments received during the second Last Call. Finally, the IAB produced a statement regarding the issues discovered with the publication of Unicode version 7 (though the issue dates back well before that) that changed assumptions made during the development of IDNA. Because this document is based on IDNA, the same issues apply to this document. The WG addressed this in section 13.4 of the document. The IESG reviewed this section and, fully understanding that this might constitute a technical omission in the document, concluded that the explanation given in this section is sufficient and that the document was still worth publishing. Document Quality The approach used by the document is similar to IDNA 2008 approach (use of Unicode character properties for deciding what to do with characters) and thus wasn't controversial (save the discussion noted above regarding section 13.4). Several protocols intend to use the framework described in this document, and people from different working groups have been contributing to this work, including folks involved in iSCSI and RADIUS. Personnel The document shepherd is Alexey Melnikov. The responsible Area Director is Pete Resnick.
