Re: [idn] UTF-8 / RACE

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

--On 01-05-26 18.21 -0700 Sherin Alsoudani <sherinalsoudani@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> 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?

See separate message sent by me.

You have two different problems here:

(1) If we start using UTF-8, the octets which are sent over the wire will
in the cases the data passes some software which is not upgraded destroy
the data. This is why we need to upgrade software for UTF-8. The software
can be the email client you use, the SMTP server, the DNS forwarding
server, the HTTP proxy, the firewall application, or just whatever between
the service you use and yourself.

(2) If you use an ACE approach (RACE will most certainly NOT be the
encoding used), the data will be possible to be sent from A to B, just
because it is encoded "in english" or rather, "with characters/octets which
we already use today". You need to upgrade your email client, your web
broswer and other client applications to be able to see the orginal
characters in the script it was written in by the sender of the data.

Difference is that in UTF-8 you need to replace all intermediate servers,
while with ACE, the enduser can upgrade his applications, and only that, to
be able to see IDN's. I.e. an enduser can start using IDN's even though his
systems manager have not upgraded the system software on the servers (for
DNS, HTTP and SMTP etc) he use.

Two different reasons for upgrading, and in my view, going with ACE gives
the enduser a choice, and that is far more and better than not giving him a
choice. Further, I claim that created the success MIME ended up being for
non-ascii characters.

    paf