Re: [idn] time to move

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

...
> DNS is just one of many protocols that exchange messages containing
> domain names

In a fairly peculiar and constrained way. Unique one might say.

(dns) resolution != (apps) transparency. Good, or at last that is
comfortably consistent with my own ignorance and sloth.

I still fail the novel point of your second note, and I'm still
surprised that ACE could be considered as anything other than a
"temporary", and controversial fix, unless the problem scope has
changed without my being aware of it.

> [long defense of UTF-8, XML, and inefficient encodings in general]

Thanks for the send-up, but a whole bunch of people are betting their
time and money that there are other "efficiencies" than octet counting.
Thus far, the router, host, link, and even last-mile vendors haven't
stopped them with stakes, nooses, or other bits of constructive criticism,
and argued forcefully for "efficiency".

If the label-space is the issue referred to by "inefficiency", then
as a label-space vendor I'm really interested.

	I've blocked or otherwise squashed labels shorter than two
	octets, and have an idea as to how many "TLA" labels I will
	sell before year's end, and have a poorer idea as to how
	many labels I will sell over five years that are 20 ASCII
	characters or less, or at 30 alphanumerics plus diacriticals.

	I haven't a damn clue what the demand is for labels twice
	that size in the ASCII or ISO8859-* markets, or how important
	labels this size are in the CJKV market -- except that CNNIC
	already went utf8.

	True, the CNNIC presentation and oral comments at -50 did cite
	label octet limits as inconvenient when the encoding is utf8,
	but they obviously made a choice -- an engineering trade-off,
	and rolled out a utf8 architecture.

That's just our market research, and CNNIC's deployment experience. Your
mailage may vary, and you can see Martin's comment as well.

Cheers,
Eric