Andzrej- I hear you, and I am glad that we're aligned on the documentation capture. I believe that the presence of a variant at the top level is different than at the second level (or deeper). Just to respond on the manner in which the Mozilla community curation / approval process works, there is a large developer community that works to put together. Changes under mozilla require multiple approvals, and the approval must come from someone other than the submitter or myself. -Jothan Jothan Frakes +1.206-355-0230 tel +1.206-201-6881 fax On Mon, Jul 25, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Andrzej Bartosiewicz <andrzej@yonita.com> wrote:
Jothan,
I fully agree that we should document "ae" as type of "variant" and think how to address it.
I think that discussion that is taking place with Mozilla is a good example for us, what should we (ICANN) expect when new TLDs will be opened and variant-TLDs are going to be submitted.
What I don't actually understand with Mozilla (and this is out of the scope of ICANN VIP - sorry to mention this here): why exactly the same policies (DENIC for .DE and ARNES for .SI) are treated by Mozilla in completely different way - the first one is "whitelisted" and the second one is "blacklisted". Maybe ICANN VIP experts can also take a look at this problem and help our colleagues from .SI ccTLD to solve the problem with Mozilla different treatment of different TLDs with the same policies.
Best, -- Dr. Andrzej Bartosiewicz, CEO & President, Yonita Inc. phone (US): +1 650 2493707 phone (Poland): +48 518 235209
On 7/25/2011 8:40 PM, Jothan Frakes wrote:
I saw that you responded to the mozilla ticket. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
I understand that the visual ae issue or other ligature type combinations were not considered in the very good work that you did in the efforts with NASK to be a variant, and I have also heard from Denic about the manner in which a similar circumstance exists with the sharp s character.
I think personally that I have heard compelling anecdotal descriptions that justify the case where there could and rightly should be two separate websites for two separate domains with two separate meanings.
There are also crafty entrepreneurial participants on the internet that don't always have the best interest of the end user in mind who could leverage the visual similarity between the strings in a manner that is arguably bad for the end-user, either in a confusing manner or in some cases worse.
There is always ongoing discussion about the evolution of 'doing the right thing' with Mozilla as far as the approach taken with addressing visual variations. The objective is to ensure the least end-user confusion.
Without saying it is right or wrong how some software behaves in the presence of ligature or other visual variants that split one character into more than one, I think for the purposes and context of VIP simply exposing those as distinct variant types.
Let's simply document this as a type of variant.
This is was what the context and intent of my mention was.