[idn] A case for *ACE, other good/bad ideas, and a rant...

[William Morris <me@williammorris.com>]

Clients or servers that can not be upgraded
  Many embedded devices can't be updated because their code is stored
  in ROM or ASICs. Who knows how many are out there or how they will
  react. *ACE deals with this issue well, UTF-8 does not. It is not
  possible to determine how many devices will be affected. Imagine a
  UPS failing silently in communicating its status.
Clients or servers that can be upgraded Non-IDN Systems
  There will be systems on the Internet for the foreseeable future
  that can handle IDN but will not be upgraded due to various reasons.
  Unless someone takes over the Internet again, there will continue to
  be systems running cc: mail or worse. Clients will attempt to
  communicate with these systems directly, therefore *ACE translation
  MUST be done on the client if it is implemented. Last week I spoke
  with a customer who is running a cc: mail to uucp gateway to send
  mail to the Internet. If you dont mind losing communications between
  those who cant or wont upgrade and those that must use IDN, then
  something other then *ACE is an option.
Input devices
  All known systems that are capable of connecting to the Internet and can
  accept user input, have support for entering the 37 possible characters
  a-z,0-9,- currently possible in a domain name. The user may not
  understand them, but the worst case is someone who only understands
  klingon can look at a business card and select characters from a chart
  of 37, and the most confusing would be O vs 0 which could be resolved by
  using a better font or guessing. Worst case two email addresses per
  card, one in their native language, one in ASCII. Most likely they will
  have another domain name they use or they can use the *ACE version.

Other (bad/good)Ideas...
  Update all of the network protocols to support UTF-8, and make UTF-8
  mandatory for IPv6. Add an opcode to DNS to support UTF-8 query and
  response.

Nameprep is manditory for IDN. there is no way around it. Using the
  Japanese input method for Win98 if you hit period you get one of two
  characters depending on which mode (Japanese/English) you are in. Both
  of these must map to ".", because end users have enough trouble double
  clicking much less typing <gokuhigundan>(ALT+SPACE).com

Despite everything, I think losing a small percentage of communications on
the Internet is better then continuing to prevent a greater population of
potential users who cannot read or write English. Given that many will
agree that UTF-8 is an ideal end goal, I would rather go thru the hell of
upgrading customers(wetware/etc) to support IDN once.

While sad, I would rather that I had problems communicating with a friend
in Japan because pine doesnt support UTF-8 email addresses then deal with
something that in my opinion is a hack, a clever hack but a hack none the
less.

I say force everyone to support or upgrade to UTF-8, if they need to give
their email address to someone who cant type it they should register
5464786464.com or something...

-Bill