Re: [idn] San Diego Meeting Notes

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

> I guess we'll now need an examination of whether:
> 
>  (a) There is a need to assess the risk of failure for each proposal.
> 
> and
> 
>  (b) What the criteria for measuring the "risk of failure" is.

actually we don't have to do that.  we need to reach rough
consensus on a proposal.  that doesn't mean we have to have
consensus on the reasons for supporting that proposal.

however it does seem like we'd prefer to support a proposal that
seems likely to be adopted, and to be deployable.  if adoption
of an IDN solution causes people too much more pain than not doing
so, they'll be less likely to deploy it.

perhaps "risk of failure" isn't the best way to describe this,
but I hope my meaning is sufficiently clear anyway.

I suppose one could contrast this with the "cost of inelegance"
(also insufficiently defined) of having to use ACE on the wire
for an arbitrary number of years,  and the potential "cost of
multiple conversions" associated with having to convert from
ASCII to ACE and then to UTF-8 (or something else) later.
I don't deny the first cost or the potential for the second cost;
I'm just trying to state the nature of the design choice.

Keith