Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 00/12/25 09:08 +0100, Patrik F$BgM(Btstr$B‹N(B wrote:
>At 16.44 -0800 00-12-24, Rick H Wesson wrote:
>>There are also a lot of of protocols that
>>expect name parts to be in 7bit ASCII, SMTP and SNMP come to mind, the
>>latter being one that is often found in embedded systems running critical
>>network infractstructure.
>
>SMTP, SNMP, IMAP, POP, HTTP just to mention a few.
>
>They can be updated of course (and I think that is your point). The 
>Applications Area have created a small task-force(!) which is to review 
>the protocols in question to see what can be done with them to see that 
>they are internationalized. I.e. not only the domainname is to be 
>internationalized but most certainly other protocol elements which are 
>displayed to the user aswell. One example is the localpart in email addresses.

That's a very good point. But I strongly believe that's a strong
point for using UTF-8. Here's why: If we use an ACE solution, each
protocol will have to rehash many similar problems: Whether to use
UTF-8 or ACE or some other ACE different from the DNS ACE or something
completely different altogether, also in the case of ACE, how to
distinguish between original ASCII and ACE, and so on. We'll end
up with something extremely fragmentary and patched. Even for those
protocols where it would be rather easy and beneficial to use UTF-8,
there will be discussions about what to do.

That will be different if we use UTF-8 for DNS. It will be much
easier for application protocols to use the same solution. Of
course it will not be painless for each of these protocols and
their implementations, but the general direction will be clear,
and interfacing will be easier.


>Also, there is a question whether UTF-8 is really what we should use. 
>UTF-8 is not much more different than any ACE encoding because it is just 
>yet another encoding of the 32 bit characters which is what many people 
>feel we should start to use instead of the 7-bit which we use today. So, 
>the transision is not from 7bit to 8bit, it is from 7bit to 32bit clean 
>transport, and that is a completely different issue.

As far as I know, the Internet, even for IPv6, is an 8-bit protocol.
Does this imply that this should be changed? If not, wouldn't it
just create another mismatch?


Regards,   Martin.