Network Working Group M. Crispin Internet-Draft University of Washington Document: internet-drafts/draft-crispin-comparator-unicode-00.txt November 2006 Internet Application Protocol Simple Unicode Comparator Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, each author represents that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which he or she is aware have been or will be disclosed, and any of which he or she becomes aware will be disclosed, in accordance with Section 6 of BCP 79. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. A revised version of this document will be submitted to the RFC editor as an Informational Document for the Internet Community. A revised version of this draft document will be submitted to the RFC editor as a Proposed Standard for the Internet Community. Discussion and suggestions for improvement are requested, and should be sent to ietf-imapext@IMC.ORG. This document will expire before 27 May 2007. Distribution of this memo is unlimited. Abstract This document describes "i;unicode-casemap", a simple case-insensitive collation for Unicode strings. It provides equality, substring and ordering operations. Introduction The "i;ascii-casemap" collation described in [COMPARATOR] is quite simple to implement and provides case-independent comparisons for the 26 Latin alphabetics. It is specified as the default and/or baseline comparator in some application protocols, e.g., [IMAP-SORT]. It is possible, with a modest extension, to provide a more sophisticated collation with greater multilingual applicability than "i;ascii-casemap". This collation, "i;unicode-casemap", is intended to be an alternative to, and preferred over, "i;ascii-casemap". It does not replace the "i;basic" collation described in [BASIC]. 1. Unicode Casemap Collation Description The "i;unicode-casemap" collation is a simple collation which operates on Unicode strings and treats characters case-insensitively. It provides equality, substring and ordering operations. All input is valid. For the equality and ordering operations, each input string is prepared by converting it to "titlecased canonicalized UTF-8" as follows on a per-character basis: (1) If the string is in a non-Unicode character set, the codepoint is converted from that character set to the associated codepoint in Unicode. (2) If the codepoint has a titlecase property in UnicodeData.txt (this is normally the same as the uppercase property) the codepoint is converted to the titlecased codepoint. (3) If the codepoint as a decomposition property in UnicodeData.txt the codepoint is converted to the decomposed codepoints. (4) The resulting codepoint(s) is/are appended to the titlecased canonicalized UTF-8 string. The resulting two titlecased canonicalized UTF-8 strings are then treated as in i;octet for equality and ordering. Care should be taken when using OS-supplied functions to implement this collation as it is not locale sensitive. Functions such as strcasecmp and toupper are sometimes locale sensitive and may inconsistently casemap letters. The i;unicode-casemap collation is well suited to to use with many Internet protocols and computer languages. Use with natural language is often inappropriate: even though the collation apparently supports languages such as Swahili and English, in real-world use it tends to mis-sort a number of types of string: o people and place names containing scripts that are not collated according to "alphabetical order". o words with characters that have diacriticals. However, i-unicode-casemap generally does a better job than i;ascii-casemap for most (but not all) languages. For example, German umlaut letters will sort correctly, but some Scandinavian letters will not. o names such as "Lloyd" (which in Welsh sorts after "Lyon", unlike in English), o strings containing other non-letter symbols; e.g., euro and pound sterling symbols, quotation marks other than '"', dashes/hyphens, etc. 2. Unicode Casemap Collation Registration i;unicode-casemap Unicode Casemap equality order substring RFC XXXX IETF mrc@cac.washington.edu 3. Security Considerations Collations will normally be used with UTF-8 strings. Thus the security considerations for [UTF-8], [STRINGPREP] and [UNICODE-SECURITY] also apply and are normative to this specification. 4. IANA Considerations The i;unicode-casemap collation should be added to the registry of collations defined in [COMPARATOR] 5. Normative References The following documents are normative to this document: [BASIC] ???, Work in Progress. [COMPARATOR] Newman, C., "Internet Appplication Protocol Collation Registry", Work in Progress. [STRINGPREP] Hoffman, P. and M. Blanchet, "Preparation of Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")", RFC 3454, December 2002. [UTF-8] Yergeau, F., "UTF-8, a transformation format of ISO 10646", STD 63, RFC 3629, November 2003. [UNICODE-SECURITY] Davis, M. and M. Suignard, "Unicode Security Considerations", February 2006, . 6. Informative References: [IMAP-SORT] Crispin, M. "Internet Message Access Protocol - SORT and THREAD Extensions", Work in Progress. Appendices Author's Address Mark R. Crispin Networks and Distributed Computing University of Washington 4545 15th Avenue NE Seattle, WA 98105-4527 Phone: +1 (206) 543-5762 EMail: MRC@CAC.Washington.EDU Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2006). This document is subject to the rights, licenses and restrictions contained in BCP 78, and except as set forth therein, the authors retain all their rights. This document and the information contained herein are provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE CONTRIBUTOR, THE ORGANIZATION HE/SHE REPRESENTS OR IS SPONSORED BY (IF ANY), THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 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