Feedback on Unicode Technical Standard #46

Hello Mark,

Here is my personal feedback on Unicode IDNA Compatible Preprocessing.  Mostly it is editorial. It is based on Version 2 (draft 2). (I had several other comments which have already been addressed in this version.)

[1] Note one too many s's in the title.

[2] I found it occasionally confusing that the word 'map' is used in different ways.  In some places it is used to mean 'normalize', and in others 'convert to punycode'.   Eg. 

"Transforming (mapping) a Unicode string to remove case and other variant differences. " [I would prefer '(normalizing')]

"Both map a Unicode for a domain name in a URL (like  http://öbb.at) to the Punycode version " 

There are some places where it isn't clear in the text whether the issue centres around the normalization process or the mapping to punycode.  I'd like to see different terms used for these operations.


[3] "Both map a Unicode for a domain name in a URL (like  http://öbb.at) to the Punycode version (like http://xn--bb-eka.at). "
=> "Both map a non-ASCII label for a domain name ..."

[4] " Map  http://ÖBB.at to  http://øbb.at "
I think the ø should be ö

[5] "For more information, see the Mapping document in [IDNA2008]."

Please provide a more direct link.  I couldn't find this quickly.

[6] "IDNA2008 does define a particular mapping, but it is not normative, and does not attempt to be compatible with IDNA2003."

My initial reaction to reading that is that this document ought to discuss how that mapping is different from that proposed in this document, and why this is better.

[7] "The label must not begin with a combining mark, that is: [:gc=M:]"

The notation at the end of the sentence has not been introduced, and for some will be obscure.  I suggest replacing it with text for this section.  Same for "[:Join_Control:] "

[8] "Major improvement in making process of updating to future Unicode versions mostly-automatically"
=> ".. mostly automatic"

[9] I think it would be useful to have a section in the earlier part of the document that explains how subtractions are dealt with, and what are the implications of that.  There is a tangential reference in the faq to symbols, but not much else, as far as I can see.


Hope that helps,
RI
 

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Thursday, 29 October 2009 16:38:35 UTC