Wampum

I've spent at least half my waking hours since mid-afternoon of the 17th, when the proposal to ban any but one of the Latin, Arabic-Indic, and Eastern Arabic-Indic digits in any DNS label was made to the IETF's IDNAbis WG, on Arabic Script and Arabic Script Typography.

I'd seen mixed Latin and Arabic-Indic in Cairo. I learned to read Arabic digits reading license plates which are (on plates only a few years old) dual texts. The "never ever" scope of the proposal seemed to misstate to my credulous peers (the definition of "internationalization expert" in most ASCII-centric computing corporations is the first Asian coder at hand) a couple of conflated issues.

Here's something anyone with bandwidth and an interest in literacy, anybody's literacy, should sit through. An Evening of Arabic Typography.

As one of my correspondents from Tehran noted after scores of frequently more difficult than necessary interactions on two overlapping lists:

There seems to be a divide in list between Arab and Persian view points on various matters which really has nothing to do with being Arab or Persian. The point is that all our Arab colleagues are governmental people (mostly coming from the regulatory body); they're used to ordering people around and telling the customers what they can register. In our case, being non-governmental, we have to serve the customers and are perhaps more sensitive to their needs.

As it that weren't enough fun, Google has an effort underway for Emoji (絵文字), or "picture characters", the graphical versions of :-) and its friends, are widely used and especially popular among Japanese cell phone users.

Uses of Arabic Script, ranging from spray paint on junk cars to high-end arabic typography, and what characters we allow in domain names is non-trivial, and our choices are authority (excluding things like Emoji) and its non-adherents. Perhaps authority and its non-celebrants.

At least my eyes aren't bleeding. When I reviewed Siksika (hi mom!), the Crees (note the plural, you don't want to know about the w-dot and dot-w boundary in Cree, let alone the Eastern Cree Syllabics -- Th-Cree, n-dialect, ... and Western Cree Syllabics -- Y-Cree boundary, which isn't in the same place), Carrier/Dené, and Inuktitut my eyes were definitely bleeding.