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PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols
draft-ietf-precis-framework-23

Approval announcement
Draft of message to be sent after approval:

Announcement

From: The IESG <iesg-secretary@ietf.org>
To: IETF-Announce <ietf-announce@ietf.org>
Cc: RFC Editor <rfc-editor@rfc-editor.org>,
    precis mailing list <precis@ietf.org>,
    precis chair <precis-chairs@tools.ietf.org>
Subject: Protocol Action: 'PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-precis-framework-23.txt)

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'PRECIS Framework: Preparation, Enforcement, and Comparison of
   Internationalized Strings in Application Protocols'
  (draft-ietf-precis-framework-23.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Preparation and Comparison of
Internationalized Strings Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Pete Resnick and Barry Leiba.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-precis-framework/


Ballot Text

Technical Summary

   Application protocols using Unicode characters in protocol strings
   need to properly prepare such strings in order to perform valid
   comparison operations (e.g., for purposes of authentication or
   authorization).  This document defines a framework enabling
   application protocols to perform the preparation and comparison of
   internationalized strings ("PRECIS") in a way that depends on the
   properties of Unicode characters and thus is agile with respect to
   versions of Unicode.

Working Group Summary

   The WG spent some time deciding how many classes need to be defined
   and what kind of class is suitable for "profiling" for different
   purposes. In particular the discussion of use of spaces in Identifier
   class took a bit of time. But the WG converged at the end.

   This document went through two IETF Last Calls and two IESG
   Evaluations. At the end of the first Last Call, concerns were raised
   regarding how the term "profiles" was being used in the context of
   this document. Additionally, a good deal of the text was copied in
   from IDNA instead of importing definitions. The IESG also had
   concerns about how the IANA registry was to be created. The document
   was updated to address these issues. Additionally, the WG changed the
   discussion Directionality to address review comments received during
   the second Last Call. Finally, the IAB produced a statement regarding
   the issues discovered with the publication of Unicode version 7
   (though the issue dates back well before that) that changed
   assumptions made during the development of IDNA. Because this
   document is based on IDNA, the same issues apply to this document.
   The WG addressed this in section 13.4 of the document. The IESG
   reviewed this section and, fully understanding that this might
   constitute a technical omission in the document, concluded that the
   explanation given in this section is sufficient and that the document
   was still worth publishing.

Document Quality

   The approach used by the document is similar to IDNA 2008 approach
   (use of Unicode character properties for deciding what to do with
   characters) and thus wasn't controversial (save the discussion noted
   above regarding section 13.4).

   Several protocols intend to use the framework described in this
   document, and people from different working groups have been
   contributing to this work, including folks involved in iSCSI and
   RADIUS.


Personnel

   The document shepherd is Alexey Melnikov.
   The responsible Area Director is Pete Resnick.

RFC Editor Note