Re: Just send UTF-8 with nameprep (was: RE: [idn] Reality Check)

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 08:50 01/07/17 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>At 11:47 PM +0900 7/17/01, Martin Duerst wrote:
>>If you can explain to me why ACE should be better than NAT,
>>and why deployed applications should stop working with the
>>domain names they always have worked with until now,
>>I'll accept your comments.
>
>I'll do it for Keith:
>
>IDNA lets applications use the domain names that they have always worked 
>with just as they are.

As I have remarked earlier, we don't need this WG to allow
people to create random domain name labels. ACE is not
'domain names just as they are'. It's a clear layer violation.
You can't do any serious kind of processing (e.g. sorting,
searching,...) on ACEd domain names.


>Your proposal it to break all current applications by requiring the 
>application to both do UTF-8 (which many don't do)

There are mainly three cases:
- Those that just pass data along. Most implementations nowadays are
   8-bit transparent, for most others, it's easy to clean them.
- Those that do some actual character processing, but not display.
   These will require work, but considerably less with UTF-8 than
   with ACE.
- Those that do display. Again, less work with UTF-8
   than with ACE. And more work already done.


>and to do nameprep (which those that currently do UTF-8 don't do).

Again, nameprep only is easier than nameprep+ACE.
And as I have explained to Patrick, while on the registration
side, 100% nameprep and nothing less is extremely important,
on the application side, it's not really that important.


Regards,    Martin.