Comments on Devanagari VIP team report

[John C Klensin <klensin+icann@xxxxxxx>]

                           ICANN VIP Project: Devanagari 
                                                John C Klensin

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Note: This review was prepared at the request of the ICANN
Variant Information Project Team and partially supported by
ICANN.  It reflects the author's personal views and may not
reflect the views of ICANN staff, the members of the VIP teams,
or other personnel associated with ICANN.  The author had the
opportunity to do partial reviews of working drafts of this
document and prepared comments for the team.  Some of those
comments are reflected in the report as posted and hence do not
appear here.  Sections of it draw heavily on other work by the
author that bears on the issues discussed.

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This is an well-written and thorough report that shows the
influence of careful thinking about the script and its use.  It
is careful to distinguish between string considerations for DNS
labels and those that might apply to running text.  The
document also provides a valuable tutorial on the use of
characters from this script and those from several
closely-related scripts.  The team apparently could not write
what they considered an acceptable report without examining the
comparative cases suggests that ICANN consider whether, for
domain purposes, the multiple scripts derfived from Brahmi
should be considered as a singe extended collecgtion of
characters with additional restrictions about intra-label
homogeniety.  The report makes the extra effort to identify
issues from multiple perspectives, which I find very useful.

Perhaps more than any of the other reports, this one largely
identifies issues and poses questions rather than creeping
toward solutions and technology requirements.  That is what
this phase of the project asks for but makes the implications
of the report somewhat harder to understand than those that
explore more specific recommendations.

In addition, while the other reports focus on exploration of
characters and label strings, this report examines a number of
use contexts for issues.  It would have been helpful had more
of the reports done that.

Small points:

o The issue with U+02BC, identified in Section 3.4, is anothr
instance of the "Common and Ihnerited Script" problem discussed
in my Overview review.   

o The discussion of browser behavior in Section 3.3.1 need not
be true for all possible browsers and extensions --the
behaviors are not inherent in the set of protocols that
browsers are effectively required to support.

o Discussions of email addresses should note that, while email
may be addressed to subdomains of a TLD (IDN or otherwise), it
is not possible to address mail to a user at the TLD-name
itself.