Subject: Protocol Action: 'IDNA Review for New Unicode Versions' to Proposed Standard (draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review-05.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2019 06:47:21 -0800

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'IDNA Review for New Unicode Versions'
  (draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review-05.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document has been reviewed in the IETF but is not the product of an IETF
Working Group.

The IESG contact person is Barry Leiba.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-klensin-idna-unicode-review/

Technical Summary

    The standards for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
    (IDNA) require a review of each new version of Unicode to determine
    whether incompatibilities with prior version or other issues exist
    and, where appropriate, to allow the IETF to decide on the trade-offs
    between compatibility with prior IDNA versions and compatibility with
    Unicode going forward.  That requirement, and its relationship to
    tables maintained by IANA, has caused significant confusion in the
    past.  This document makes adjustments to the review procedure based
    on experience and updates IDNA, specifically RFC 5892, to reflect
    those changes and clarify the various relationships involved.  It
    also makes other minor adjustments to align that document with
    experience.

Working Group Summary

This is a document regarding recommendations to the registry and
registrar community that could only be developed by experts on IDNA, of
which the IETF has very few. A 4-week IETF-wide Last Call has been more
than enough time for the i18ndir list to remind experts to take a final
look and confirm that there is community consensus, insofar as that ever
exists for these kinds of documents.

Document Quality

The shepherd has done a review of the document and thinks it is 
technically sound. The most controversial bit of this document is 
actually section 4:

    This document restores and clarifies that original language and
    intent: absent extremely strong evidence on a per-code point basis
    that preserving the validity status of possible existing (or
    prohibited) labels would cause significant harm, Unicode changes that
    would affect IDNA derived properties are to be reflected in IDNA
    exceptions that preserves the status of those labels.

The shepherd is agnostic as to whether this is the correct move, but it
is the only pragmatic choice given the state of the world, and there was
no disagreement with that choice in any of the reviews.

Personnel
Pete Resnick is the document shepherd, and the responsible AD is Barry Leiba.