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

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, J. William Semich wrote:

| To conclude - there is significant effort underway in the OS community
| to support or to extend support for UNICODE via UTF8. There is none -
| so far - for an ACE.

  I nominate Bill to head the effort to deal with the resulting problems 
in the S* protocols.  SMTP, SNMP, etc.  That should keep him busy for a 
while. ;-)

  Seriously, transitioning this amount of infrastructure would be at least
as difficult, if not more so, than a protocol revision.  ACE has problems,
but at least you've confined the problem to a manageable area, instead of
everywhere in the universe.

  Dumb question:  Doesn't swkan-utf8 violate requirement [1] of
draft-ietf-idn-requirements-03?

"[1] The DNS is essential to the entire Internet. Therefore, the service
MUST NOT damage present DNS protocol interoperability. It MUST make the
minimum number of changes to existing protocols on all layers of the
stack. It MUST continue to allow any system anywhere to resolve any
internationalized domain name."

  As such, isn't it a non-starter?

  Bill, you can keep repeating the same thing over and over, but that
doesn't make it any more true.  That's sort of like going to the
refigerator over and over again, hoping that eventually something new will
appear.  The only thing that changes is that your standards eventually get
lower. :-)

  I guess I still don't get why some people are so focused on UTF-8.  
UTF-8 is an 8-bit encoding of the UCS.  ACE (whatever flavor) is a 7-bit
encoding of the UCS.  While UTF-8 is implemented in some places, it is not
implemented in many more places.  UTF-8 will seriously break things (as
Bill well knows), while ACE will not, unless you consider breakage to be
leakage of encoded names to users in unmodified applications.  The same
thing will happen with UTF-8 in many contexts, with less readable results.

  -bws