--On Tuesday, August 6, 2019 22:50 -0400 John Levine
<johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter
>>> to consider the following document: - 'IDNA Review for New
>>> Unicode Versions' <draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review-02.txt>
>>> as Proposed Standard
>
> I took another look and I still think it's good, keeping in
> mind that I know much less about the tortured history of IDNA
> and Unicode than jck and Patrik do.
Thanks.
> My one suggestion would be in sections 5 and 8 to tell IANA to
> remove the non-normative tables since you'll persuade people
> that not all IANA content is non-normative about the same time
> that you persuade people that not all RFCs are standards.
>
> Instead perhaps say that you hope to find workable ways to
> publish tools to create the tables that people can use as
> Unicode comes out with version 12.<n+1>. Then hand that over
> to the ongoing Github flame war since Github is the obvious
> place to put them.
This was discussed during the period in which
draft-faltstrom-unicode11 was being developed and refined and
again when we were putting together this I-D, more or less as a
summary of those discussions. My personal position on it is out
toward the radical end of the spectrum of opinions, that is, I'd
rather see the IANA tables gone. Patrik can speak for himself
(copying him in case he is not following the IETF list these
days), but he has been more inclined to leave the IANA tables
there an attach disclaimers. Possibly some of his reasons align
with mine below.
Despite my belief that the IANA tables have created confusion
and done more harm than good, I'm convinced that we should
transition out of them rather than dropping them abruptly.
First, while your analogy is interesting, I'm not sure that the
set of people who believe that all RFCs are standards and who
have not been deliberately misled is large enough to worry
about. If you want to include the group that has been
deliberately misled, then the evidence of people who have been
convinced that I-Ds are standards (or other authoritative IETF
documents) suggests that we could have the same problem with a
repository somewhere else. Second, the thing that propelled
draft-faltstrom-unicode11 and then draft-faltstrom-unicode12 and
the associated version was the IAB's conclusion that the tables
were important enough to give instructions to the Designated
Expert to get those tables out and essentially that they were
important enough to ignoring some outstanding issues. I think
we are better off moving forward than reopening those questions,
and the way forward probably involves keeping the current
versions of the tables and improving the descriptions of what
they are rather than having the IETF repudiate those IAB
decisions.
A different way to say almost the same thing is that the actions
associated with draft-faltstrom-unicode11/12 involve an
assumption of IETF consensus the publish the tables with IANA.
Reversing that decision is likely to be controversial enough
that it would be better to just keep moving forward rather than
revising the recommendations in a new version of this document,
trying to resolve that controversy, and presumably going through
a second Last Call. To me, I think there would need to be a
rather strong case for immediately removing those registries to
justify that amount of delay and level of effort. I don't
believe your suggestion above makes that case.
As to github repositories with the tables, I have to admit
having given up on trying to follow what you describe as a flame
war, but I'd think that having the IETF start putting things
into github that are formally considered authoritative, even if
not normative, would put an entirely different spin on that set
of arguments.
best,
john
