[idn] A sysadmins perspective

[lucid@epa.secret.org]

My biggest concern is supporting IDN.
Writing code, and upgrading servers are one time costs.
Support is unfortunatly reoccuring

I am happy to upgrade production nameservers,
I am wont mind upgrading production webservers,
I am willing to upgrade production mailservers, pop servers and etc.

I want to be able to tell users that they must upgrade to
Windows XP service pack 20 or MacOS X.1.2.3 or whatever
to use IDN or we wont support them.

I dont want to have to spend 4 hours on a support call
trying to explain what ACE means or explaining that
UTF-8 is a character set when the problem is that their
capslock key is stuck and mistyped their password.

IDNs should only displayed to users who userstand them.

The only way I see to do this is mapping them at the
application layer.

example: (assume ~i18n~ is any IDN name)

~i18n~.com <-mapping-> myi18n.com

Sender
--------
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 12:42:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: user <user@~i18n~.com>
To: Joe <joe@example.com>
Subject: ...


test

On-The-Wire
--------
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 12:42:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: user <user@myi18n.com>
To: Joe <joe@example.com>
Subject: ...


test

Receive with IDN
--------
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 12:42:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: user <user@~i18n~.com>
To: Joe <joe@example.com>
Subject: ...


test


Receive without IDN
--------
Date: Wed, 30 May 2001 12:42:06 -0700 (PDT)
From: user <user@myi18n.com>
To: Joe <joe@example.com>
Subject: ...


test


The IDN application could do a lookup to convert myi18n.com to ~i18n~.com
It is possible that locale style support could be built-in so that
myi18n.com is diaplayed as;
ru_RU gets ~i18n~ru~.com
en_US gets myi18n.com
ja_JP gets ~i18n~ja~.com
etc...

All of these would get converted back before being put back on the wire.

I dont know if this is functional or usefull but I am up for anything
that cuts down on support.

-Bill