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

[Bill Manning <bmanning@ISI.EDU>]

% At 00/12/26 15:20 +0800, James Seng/Personal wrote:
% 
% >For those who uses Unicode/ISO10646 as the core, they tend to use wchar_t
% >internally which is either 16bit/32bit depending on platform.
% >
% >_Some_ software use UTF-8 thru out but it is definately not a common feature
% >until recently.
% 
% As I said, web browsers support it, and they are the most important
					  ===========================
% clients for multilingual domain names. Also, conversion from
% UTF-16 or UCS-4 to UTF-8 is very simple and has been implemented
% dozens of times. The ACE proposals I have looked at are quite a bit
% more complicated, and there is rarely much code yet.
% 
% Regards,   Martin.

The point of view that seems to be espoused in the above paragraph 
makes me nervous.

In my history w/ protocol work, it has always been disasterous when
some group designs for the then current "important" or "most popular"
or "prevailing" application.  Currently "important" things often get
replaced over time.  Good protocol design should not be constrained
by the temporal popularity of any given application.

That said, UTF-8 does have some attractive features that the *ACE 
proposals lack. 



--bill