L2/06-132 Subject: Re: Unicode Technical Committee Liaison Statement to IETF on iab-idn-nextsteps Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 13:57:08 -0400 From: Leslie Daigle Dear Mark, We have received your previous notes on draft-iab-idn-nextsteps-04 from the document editors. We have seen the intensive communication between you and the editors on the UTC review of an earlier version of the draft. We realize that certain technical issues you raised remained an issue in version 04 of the draft. Having reviewed those issues carefully, we remain convinced that much of the disparity of viewpoint stems from a difference in perceived intention for the document. As stated in the document's opening remarks, the goal of the document is simply and strictly to provide a survey of the issues that have been identified as impediments to deploying IDNs in the way that meets the end users' expectations, and provide action plans for how the IETF (and other organizations, like ICANN) can address those issues. A specific non-goal of this document is to evaluate each one of those issues. It would therefore be presumptuous for us to drop issues that have been raised by the community at large, whether or not there is an expectation they will turn out to be a non-issue. The evaluation and conclusion of these issues is to be reached by the consensus driven IETF processes. Some of the points UTC has flagged as "non issues" will therefore remain listed in the document. There are also some other issues where the IAB sees the UTC does not agree with the position stated in the document. Clearly, many individuals and organisations have different views on sensitive subjects like internationalization, and we have tried to be as neutral as possible. We reiterate that these are our positions, and we've done our best to identify them as such, even as we recognize this may mean the UTC disagrees with some of them. We are at a stage that the discussion should move out of the IAB and into the public. Further revising details in the document could cause further comments and further delays to publication and delay of the discussion and evaluations that should take place in the engineering and policy arena. As a practical matter, we want to appropriately acknowledge the contributers to this document, you being a valuable one of them. To avoid possible confusion on the level of support we plan to add the last sentence of what follows to the acknowledgments section of the document: The contributions to this report from members of the IAB-IDN ad hoc committee are gratefully acknowledged. In particular, this report does not claim to reflect the views either of the Unicode Consortium as a whole or particular participants in the work of the consortium. We hope you find this appropriate, too. Of course, we hope you and the UTC will continue to be active in the IETF and other fora during the discussions that are expected to follow on from this survey of issues. Leslie, for the IAB. IAB technical contact for this topic: Olaf Kolkman