Re: [idn] time to move

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

Does "we" exclude anyone?

For quite a long time "we" ment .arpa, as in BRUNNER@SRI-SPAM.ARPA.

> various islands can go to utf-8 if they don't care about backward
> compatibility

I don't have a whole lot of 3Mb/sec Type I Ethernet lying about these
days (see above). I also don't have XNS forcing me to maintain bridged
subnets, and generally don't have pervasive obsolecense controlling my
site's infrastructure. What I do have that is obnoxious is MS Exchange,
but that's another form of brain-death.

I'm leery of letting the phrase "backward compatibility" run the show,
as it may not care very much about anything but the (vain)glorious past.
Recall, in .ARPA-time, packets to the PRC was less likely than to RSRE.

> the purpose of a standard is to provide a solution that everybody can use

Hmm. I don't suppose anyone (other than Ken Lunde) has a clue how many times
an ASCII compatible extension has been adopted by sundry national standards
bodies (non-US, obviously, lack of necessity) which for some reason simply
haven't been "adopted by the internauters" ("us" in some locales).

The CJK series of standards is stricking in its optimism that if ASCII is
repeated sufficiently often, then its extension will be advanced (somehow).
>From JIS C 6226-1978 to the present. It would be really funny if we were in
their shoes, trying to deal with some indifferent EBCDIC monster that made
sounds like "global transparancy" and "backward compatibility" every time
we tried to get it modernized. Oh. Been there. Done that. Got the tee-shirt.

> we don't need to provide a solution that can only be used by an island

Isn't this slightly disengenious?

Isn't the line of march of uniqueness and consistency and so forth predicated
upon the inexistence of ... "island(s)", and the non-deployment of utf8?

I think I'd like a helping of ECE please (EBCDIC COMPATIBLE EXTENION, shouted
naturally), and some variable length bytes on the side.

Eric