Re: [idn] I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-uri-00.txt

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

"D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote:

> Good names never include uppercase non-ASCII characters.

That would solve the problem, but at a price.  ASCII names are allowed
to use mixed case.  It would be unfair to deny the same flexibility to
non-ASCII names.  Maybe it's worth sacrificing that flexibility for the
sake of simplicity, but it's something to consider.

> If your mail software has small limits on address length, switching
> userhost from a UTF-8 IDN to an ACE IDN will drastically increase your
> chance of hitting those limits.

UTF-8 gets less than 6 bits per octet on average for the non-ASCII
octets, and the ACEs generally use base-32, which is 5 bits per
character, so that's not much different.  And since some of the ACEs
employ compression techniques, they might even be shorter than UTF-8 for
many strings.

AMC