Re: [idn] report of the straw poll

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

> > I'd be curious to know who would support idna-nameprep-ace in the
> > short term with the assurance that a native utf-8 query protocol
> > would be worked on after idna-nameprep-ace went out the door.
> 
> Can you turn that statement around and still be happy with it? Rather than
> saying, "we commit to do something better in the long term" can we say
> "ACE is the legacy interface component of XXXX long-term strategy"? IOW,
> can we define a long-term strategy that ACE plugs into?

I am not sure what is the appropriate long-term strategy for existing
applications.  I think it might be different for different applications,
that such strategies need to be worked out by the folks who are 
most familiar with those applications. And at least for some of those 
applications, the precise details of how the transformation would be
done are very important and should not be anticipated by the IDN group.

For the specific example of email I would be reluctant to support per-hop
negotiation of IDN capability, and more generally I would be reluctant
to support any per-hop negotiation which required MTAs to mung or translate
messages.  I think MTAs should in general relay mail as faithfully as 
possible from end to end without trying to anticipate what translations
are wanted by the recipients. OTOH, I might support a strategy that had 
sending UAs decide whether to generate UTF-8 or ACE addresses (on a 
per-recipient basis) based on the result of a rescap query for each 
recipient address.

Keith