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

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 12:24 01/07/17 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> > 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.
>
>ACE is an *encoding" just like UTF-8 is an *encoding*.

Sorry, no. ACE can be reapplied to ACE (the drafts of course prohibit this),
but please try to apply UTF-8 to UTF-8. Also, when the term 'UTF-5' became
known for my original proposal, there was strong pushback in the Unicode
community, and similar for UTF-7, which again maps 'more than ASCII' to
'ASCII'.

Also, ACE is used piecemeal. Maybe the lhs of an email address will
use a different ACE than the rhs, or a different prefix. Maybe it
will restart at dots, or not. There is no definition of how to apply
ACE to a text file. Content-Type: text/plain; charset=XXXACE cannot
be use. If you try to get down that path, you get the horrible
dependencies between mail header syntax and the =? ? ? ?= encoding.

Converting a file from Latin-1 to UTF-8 (or chose your encoding)
is independent of the content of the file. Converting ACE to
UTF-8 needs to parse the file (i.e. go to a different layer).



>The other thing that you're leaving out is the additional complexity that
>would be required to add UTF-8 negotiation to existing applications that
>could not be expected to deal with UTF-8 names.

The main application that really needs this is SMTP. Most others don't.
And those that do would need it for other purposes, anyway.


Regards,    Martin.