I read through the current IDN draft on the plane coming to Japan, and while I've no problem with most of the technical content insofar as I could follow it, I feel rather uneasy about some aspects of its presentation. I have one technical issue: having multiple label separator characters (i.e. the different representations of '.') seems misplaced. It seems to me like a confusion between user interface issues and protocol elements. In reading this, I couldn't feel confident that I was properly understanding what was being specified. I think a distinction should be drawn between what is being specified, and a process for calculating that value. If one were to use a different process, it can be very difficult to prove that it gives the same answer as some other process. Something else that makes me feel very uneasy about the current draft is the way it defines what constitutes a valid IDN in terms of algorithms described in two separate documents. This feels to me like putting the cart before the horse: I think this (i.e. what constitutes a valid IDN) is a fundamental idea which needs a crisp, easily understood description so that (for example) any future developments to embed IDNs directly into DNS don't get lumbered with legacy ACE code simply to determine what is a valid IDN. #g ------------------- Graham Klyne <GK@NineByNine.org>