The IESG has approved the following document: - 'Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings Representing Nicknames' (draft-ietf-precis-nickname-19.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Preparation and Comparison of Internationalized Strings Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Ben Campbell, Barry Leiba and Alissa Cooper. A URL of this Internet Draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-nickname/ Technical Summary This document describes methods for handling internationalized nicknames (or petnames). Such uses are common in XMPP Multi-User Chat (MUC), Message Session Relay Protocol (MSRP), and Centralized Conferencing (XCON), but can also be encountered in other contexts, such as contact lists, device names, and bookmarks. This document provides rules for preparing strings that represent an internationalized nickname, as well as for comparing two internationalized nicknames. Also provided is guidance for using these rules in application protocols. Review and Consensus This document received review both from participants active in the PRECIS Working Group as well as individuals from the XMPP and SIP communities. The consensus of the PRECIS Working Group is to publish this document. A major topic of discussion in the Working Group was in regard to "confusables", characters that often visually appear very similar to (if not indistinguishable from) other characters. While there was desire to further combat confusables (e.g., rules and/or guidelines on incorporating a "confusables" table), ultimately the consensus of the Working Group was to warn implementers of their existence, use NFKC normalization to mitigate a large degree of confusables, and note there might be more rules or guidelines implementers and deployers could follow (UTS39). Personnel Matthew Miller is the document shepherd, and Barry Leiba is the responsible AD.
