Re: [idn] Report from the ACE design team

[Dan <Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se>]

>
>>If ACE is intended to be used forever
>
>if transition is long, then long ~= forever.
>
>>(also probably meaning that
>>we will hav 63 byte limit forever), compression is most important.
>
>so we are in agreement!, compression is most important ;-)))
>

Not at all. Simplicity is most important. By making ACE not being perfect
we give everybody a good reason to switch to UTF-8.

I see a big need of UTF-8, transmitted normalised, not canonicalised,
over the DNS protocol. ACE+nameprep (as defined today) will destroy data
in names, that is unacceptable for me and breaks current semantics of DNS.

Also, the ACE+nameprep solution do not cover the parts of the DNS protocol
that contains character data outside "host names".

While ACE+nameprep is ok as a backward compatibility is is not a working
solution for an internationalised DNS. Even if the IDN working group
has its focus on "host names", I think it must promote a solution
for the entire problem of DNS internationalisation, not just a
backward compatibility solution for having non-ascii host names.

   Dan