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

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

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

| That said, I am not advocating one or the other particularly as an IDN
| solution. (I see that the ACE advocates have strong arguments in their
| favor.) But you need to understand that UTF-8 and ACE are not just
| morally equivalent "encodings" to understand why UTF-8 advocates would
| be so focussed on it.

  Fair enough.  Having gone through the process of writing a couple of ACE
drafts and thinking about this stuff, at some level 'bits are bits', and
seem all morally equivalent (do bits have morals? :-)  But perhaps my
perspective is tainted.

  This reminds me of the Magritte painting of a tobacco pipe with the text
"Ce n'est pas une pipe" [this is not a pipe].  i.e. its a picture of a
pipe.  

  UTF-8 is not the codepoint.  Its a representation of the codepoint.  
That's all I'm trying to say.  I think some folks find the ACE idea
intuitively 'dirty', and the UTF-8 idea 'clean'.

  -bws