Re: [idn] San Diego Meeting Notes

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

Dan,

your analysis assumes that most sites are or will be using UTF-8 locally.  
this seems like quite a stretch as it is very different from current reality.
IMHO it would be much more realistic to assume that folks who are currently 
using some other non-ASCII charset in their locale will continue to do so 
for quite some time - each will convert to UTF-8 in his/her own timeframe
(if ever).  

if you make that assumption, the costs of upgrading those applications to 
convert between local representation and either ACE or UTF-8 are quite 
similar.  ACE wins not because it costs significantly less for conversion
but because it allows each site to upgrade in its own timeframe, thus
lowering the barrier to adoption of IDNs.

of course, nobody can predict the future with 100% accuracy, and reasonable 
people will disagree on how things will unfold.   but for this very reason
it makes sense to choose a IDN deployment strategy that seems likely to 
work in a variety of future scenarios - i.e. whether or not people convert 
to UTF-8.  

ACE seems to have a lower risk of failure.

Keith