Subject: Protocol Action: Preparation of Internationalized Strings ('stringprep') to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2002 13:08:10 -0400

The IESG has approved Preparation of Internationalized Strings
('stringprep') <draft-hoffman-stringprep-07.txt> as a Proposed
Standard. This document is the product of the IDN Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Erik Nordmark and Thomas Narten.

Technical Summary
 
This document describes a framework for preparing Unicode text strings
in order to increase the likelihood that string input and string
comparison work in ways that make sense for typical users throughout
the world. The stringprep protocol is useful for protocol identifier
values, company and personal names, internationalized domain names, and
other text strings.

This document does not specify how protocols should prepare text
strings. Protocols must create profiles of stringprep in order to fully
specify the processing options.

This document can be when protocols need a mechanism to compare
identifiers that use Unicode. One use is for IDN, but there are other
potential uses for IP storage, Kerberos, etc.

Working Group Summary
 
The working group resolved two major comments in response to the IETF
last call (plus minor and editorial comments). The major comments where
  - change from using Unicode 3.1 to 3.2
  - added restrictions for bidirectional characters

A new WG last call was done on these changes.

There was WG concensus to advance this document.

Protocol Quality
 
This document has been reviewed for the IESG by Erik Nordmark.

RFC Editor Note:

In section 3.2 change:
Authors of profiles of this document need to consider the effects of
changing the mapping of any currently-assigned character when updating
their profiles. Adding a new mapping for a currently-assigned character,
or changing an existing mapping, could change the behavior that users
see in both systems that have been updated and systems that have not
been updated.

to read:

Authors of profiles of this document need to consider the effects of
changing the mapping of any currently-assigned character when updating
their profiles. Adding a new mapping for a currently-assigned character,
or changing an existing mapping, could cause a variance between the
behavior of systems that have been updated and systems that have not
been updated.