[idn] UTF-8 / RACE

["Sherin Alsoudani" <sherinalsoudani@hotmail.com>]

Dear members of IDN working group,

As an IT representative from the Middle East, I have been following the 
discussion with some interest but I have not felt qualified to comment.  I 
do have a question however after reading the emails being exchanged back and 
forth.

It appears that switching to UTF-8 will cause much existing software to 
break due to the large number of applications that are only 7-bit clean.  
This will necesitate much work to replace that software with updated 
versions that can process UTF-8.

My question is this: will RACE have a similar problem?  Even if RACE 
converts multilingal domain names to English, will we not have to update our 
applications to convert the domain names via RACE?

For example, if my email program needs to be updated to support UTF-8, does 
it not also need to be updated to handle RACE?  Just different places of the 
code - but nonetheless an update either way?

Thank you very much.  I have many other questions, but please educate me 
first by helping me understand the answer to this first one.

Sherin

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