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

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

At 19.33 +0900 01-01-03, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
>>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?

It all depends with what you mean by "is an 8-bit protocol". If you 
read RFC 821, you see that it is definitly not 8bit clean, but 
instead only handles characters in US-ASCII. Yes, sent in 8-bit 
octets in many cases, but still.

The most important issues are though:

   - Other protocol elements which are visible to users in the
     today US-ASCII only protocols.
   - How to do nameprep correctly (and implemented in a way which
     is interoperable).

Because of these things, I none of the operating systems etc which 
today use UTF-8 handle this correctly. All of them have to be changed.

     paf