Newprep BoF Meeting Minutes
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
IETF 77, Anaheim, CA, USA

BoF Co-chairs: Marc Blanchet, Peter Saint-Andre
Mailing list: newprep@ietf.org

Peter Saint-Andre described the rationale, goals, and expected outcome
for this BoF.

Patrick Falstrom described the work of IDNAbis and the rationale 
behind moving beyond Stringprep.  Discussions with the floor touched on 
compatibility between IDNA2003 and IDNAbis and how this relates to 
protocols using Stringprep.

David Black, Peter Saint-Andre, and Kurt Zeilenga presented about the
use of Stringprep in iSCSI, LDAP, SASL, and XMPP.

XMPP uses 3 different Stringprep profiles (one via IDNA2003). SASL uses
1 Stringprep profile. LDAP uses a family of profiles. iSCSI uses one 
Stringprep profile, where the identifier contains a domain name.

Most speakers stated that their use of Stringprep must be updated for 
various reasons such as:
- update to latest Unicode standard
- get Unicode version agility as IDNA2008
- better bidi support

Most speakers care about backward compatibility, such as the characters 
that were removed in IDNAbis, the change in the normalization form, and 
case-mapping. These would need to be addressed for protocols replacing 
Stringprep.

Most speakers stated that this new work should not be done in their 
respective working groups, since the expertise in i18n is not there.  They 
would highly prefer being done by a group of i18n experts with obviously 
close discussions among the respective working group.

The BoF was polled on the following questions:
- do people think there is a problem to solve? 
  unanimously yes.
- do people think the problem should be solved by the related working 
  groups or by forming a specific working group? 
  unanimously: forming a specific working group.

END