Re: [idn] San Diego Meeting Notes

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 11:45 AM +0900 1/26/01, dlee@icu.ac.kr wrote:
>The problem is we don't know yet what the long term solution would be.
>In that context, I'm not sure whether the proposed solution is a 
>solution for a short
>term (it could lock us up longer than we expect as Klensin pointed 
>out) though I agree that the ACE-based approach is a simple solution 
>to allow users to use IDN with the current DNS protocol.

Well, I certainly won't speak for John, but but I don't remember him 
speaking about a short-term solution locking us up. He said that an 
even half-successful short-term solution will make it less likely 
that users will pressure us to to a good long-term solution. He also 
warned strongly about any short-term solution that changes the DNS in 
a way that makes it hard to implement a long-term solution. I agree 
with both of those.

The ACE-based solutions proposed so far will not change the DNS in a 
way that makes it hard to implement any long-term solution. The 
ACE-based presentation-layer solutions don't change the characters 
allowed or disallowed in host names (a through z, 0 through 9, 
hyphen), with the terribly minor exception of host names that begin 
with a particular weird prefix.  Even in the presentation layer, 
these solutions don't prevent later presentation-layer changes for 
different encodings.

Of the two themes of long-term DNS proposals so far (marked binary 
names such as UDNS or IDNE, or a radical change to the DNS such as a 
new class), neither is affected by a presentation-layer ACE-based 
solution, other than the desire for them will be slowed. It is easy 
to imagine that a long-term UTF8-based solution would completely 
coexist with an ACE-based solution in the presentation layer and on 
the wire, with no conflict at all.

Even the directory-based solutions that have been discussed but not 
well documented would not be affected by an ACE-based solution, and 
in fact might be helped, because people will see that the Internet is 
truly international much sooner. (As you can tell, this is, so far, 
my preferred long-term solution.)

Am I missing some significant effect that ACEs might have on other 
long-term solutions?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium