Re: [idn] UTF-8 / RACE

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

Dear Adam,

I have some very strong reservations about some of the points you have 
raised.  Though I do not consider myself a DNS expert by any means, I 
believe my experience as a software developer gives me enough insight to 
hopefully understand most of what you wrote.

My comments are interspersed below.

>From: "Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>
>To: idn@ops.ietf.org
>Subject: Re: [idn] UTF-8 / RACE
>Date: Sun, 27 May 2001 21:30:52 +0000
>
>Some people seem to be arguing that using ACE requires no less (or even
>more) upgrading of software than using UTF-8 without ACE.  While it may
>be true that ACE-fully-working-everywhere requires as much upgrading as
>UTF-8-working-fully-everywhere, that comparison overlooks an important
>point.
>
>ACE affords incremental deployment much better than no-ACE.  Suppose I
>am considering getting an IDN for my domain.  With ACE, this will make
>things better for some users (who have upgraded their clients to decode
>the ACE) and worse for others (who have old clients and will see ugly
>ACEs) but nothing will actually break (mail will get through, web pages
>will load, etc).

This is completely wrong because it disregards the human face of the 
Internet.  This working group should not just focus on "clients", 
"applications", and "protocols".  We should keep in mind the bottom line: 
the Internet is basically a medium for communication.  If by converting to 
ACE, it makes it easier for the client/application/protocol developers, but 
makes it harder for the *average* person to get on the Internet, then I have 
strong reservations against ACE.  In my part of the world, the Middle East, 
the hugely overwhelming majority of the population is not English-fluent at 
all.  To say that "nothing will actually break" is wrong - this is only at 
the protocol etc. level.  However, at the human level, if the IDN is an ACE, 
and my application does not support the proper display of that IDN, then 
something most definitely WILL break: the human user of that application 
will simply not type in that IDN.

To me, the final result is the same: even if ACE is inherently friendlier to 
the existing infrastructure, most people will not be able to utilize IDN's 
because they will not understand the ACE encoded name whatsoever.  People 
will have to upgrade their applications.

>But without ACE, if I get an IDN for my domain, this will make things
>better for some users (who have upgraded their clients, or who are lucky
>enough to already be using UTF-8 clients) and will *completely* *break*
>things for other users (mail will not get through, web pages will not
>load, etc).  There may be nothing those users can do to fix it, because
>the breakage might be happening in their provider's software.  The
>provider might be very slow to upgrade, because 99% of their customers
>might be English speakers, and the other 1% are just screwed.

This is not true.  In the Middle East, there are at least two or three 
providers of IDN's currently: Walid, i-DNS, and Nativ Name.  As far as I 
understand, Native Name provides a UTF-8 solution, I do not know about the 
others.  The response has been very strong from what I know: providers ARE 
switching to UTF-8; there is a good chance that my ISP will upgrade to a 
UTF-8 compatible software assuming they have not done so already.  I believe 
it is a later version of BIND that is necessary.

I also read on this list that CNNIC has chosen UTF-8 as their current 
encoding.  This is another indication that providers ARE switching.

Another thing: assuming 99% English and 1% non-English in the Middle East is 
completely wrong.  I, and many other IT professionals here, are committed to 
bringing our people online.  Most of our people have little understanding of 
the written Arabic language, let alone English.

>With ACE, people might have to put visible ACEs in some config
>files, which is annoying, but at least it will work.  Eventually
>the application might get upgraded to support native characters in
>the config files and then things will get easier.  Without ACE, the
>application will simply be unusable with IDNs until it is upgraded.
>
>Conclusion: There should be ACE.

This conclusion is premature to say the least.

>Next question:  Given that there will be ACE, should DNS support 8-bit
>queries in addition to ACE queries?  I don't know.  No matter what
>is recommended or discouraged, some DNS servers will probably try to
>guess the encoding of 8-bit queries.  This will help old clients, but
>increases the risk of spoofing, and allows some applications to be
>lazier about upgrading.  I haven't yet formed an opinion on this.
>
>Next question:  Should ACE ever be phased out?  I don't think so.  Very
>few systems will ever support all Unicode characters, so applications
>will sometimes try to display IDNs containing unsupported characters.
>What should they display?  They should display the ACE, because that's
>no uglier than anything else they might display, and has the added bonus
>that you can copy it into any other application and it will still work.
>
>Furthmore, domain names are first and foremost *global* identifiers
>intended to be used by *humans* *anywhere* to refer to network objects.
>For people who know the Unicode characters in the domain name, the
>native representation is easiest, but for the billions of people who
>don't know those characters, the ACE is much easier to type, write,
>speak, and visually compare.  (The Roman alphabet is one of the smallest
>alphabets in existence, and is already widely recognized.  If you have
>to chose a fallback character set for everyone to learn, that's the best
>choice.)

If you wish to try to come to Egypt or any other place in the Middle East, 
and convince people here that English is a good choice even as a "fallback 
character set for everyone to learn", I do not envy your task as you will 
not be taken seriously.  I do not understand your comment of "billions of 
people" who do not know "those characters", where those characters are the 
native language of the people.  This is so patently wrong to me that I 
believe I must have misunderstood you.  I personally am not interested in 
seeing English propagated as the default language, as a half solution for 
multilingal domains.  It is impossible to ask us to learn the Roman language 
simply to satisfy the protocol writers.  Instead we are happy to go with a 
tougher solution that will give more access to the average, non-English 
speaker ultimately.  If we have to wait a little or a lot longer for that to 
occur, that is worth it compared to a short-term solution that requires me 
to send my mother to English spelling school.

>I'm not saying that various protocols shouldn't allow 8-bit encoding in
>addition to ACE (I have no opinion on that yet), I'm just saying that
>ACE will always serve a useful function, and should never be deprecated.
>
>AMC
>

Sherin

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