Re: [idn] UTF-8 as the long-term IDN solution

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

> He'll be working with text in UTF-8. But wait, you say, he has to
> convert to some screwy ACE format on the wire. 

yes, but there will be a library routine for that.  the programmer
will still have to deal with it, but it's not much worse than 
the effort that would otherwise be required to deal reasonably 
with message headers.

do you really think we'll be using a paper-tape I/O model 10 years 
from now?  even on UNIX?  maybe we will - it's endured a long time -
but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

> When he asks why all the
> Internet protocols have this strange complication, you mumble something
> about ancient versions of Sendmail that didn't support 8-bit text.

no, that's what *you* would say.  the rest of us might mumble something
about the need for backward compatibility with ASCII mail standards,
because we understand that sendmail is not the source of the problem.

Keith

p.s. if and when qmail has been around for 20+ years,  and if it still 
has significant popularity, some young upstart is going to trash your
code for being shortsighted and brain-damaged.  and you are not going
to want to rewrite qmail - because you will have spent too much sweat
on it and fought too many interoperability battles for that code to 
give up on it, and those things that you did to make the code ugly
will seem (even in hindsight) to have been perfectly defensible at the 
time.