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

[William Morris <me@williammorris.com>]

On 8 Jan 2001, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> William Morris writes:
> > 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.
> 
> You are confusing two separate issues: the dots, and the stuff between
> the dots.
> 
> The nameprep discussion is all about the stuff between the dots. There's
> nothing in the nameprep draft about normalizing dots. In fact, dots and
> things that look like dots are specifically prohibited.

For Non-ASCII languages, most text input is modal; you are either typing
in ASCII or Non-ASCII. Since users may not enter .com properly, and
application developers have been known to implement things oddly enough
when there are standards. I would really like dot handling in applications
to be standardized. It may not be nameprep but it needs to be dealt with.
I should be able to hit the period while in Japanese mode and have the
application do the right thing.

> Why should we believe that failures to handle 8-bit data cleanly are
> more common than failures to handle long domain names cleanly?

Because I have seen more then enough systems that choke at anything over 7
bits, and thats just in the past month. People are still using windows
3.11 to connect to the internet, 8bit-dirty terminal servers, old versions
of netware. At least you can work around long domain names.

> Are you saying that cc:Mail isn't 8-bit clean? Are you also saying that
> cc:Mail has no trouble with long domain names?

I know cc:mail will have much more problems with 8-bit data then long
domain names.

-Bill