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

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

> Perhaps we should stop trying to convince people that what they're
> working on is a waste, and just get out of each other's way.  

that sounds like a fine strategy. 

It's painfully clear that we need an ACE format for IDNs to be used in 
legacy appliactions, and that queries for ACE-encoded IDNs have to work.

If people can make a good case that we also need to support queries that 
use UTF-8 (or some other general purpose encoding of 10646), more power 
to them.  I won't swear that the case cannot be made, it's just that when
I did my own analysis of the effort involved (with the requirement that
ACE queries produce consistent results with native queries), it looked 
to be a fair amount of effort for a marginal amount of gain.   

The one thing that I don't want is for the folks who want UTF-8 on the
wire to block progress on deployment of an ACE solution.  Because it's
clear that we need to move forward on this, and that we will need the 
ACE solution in any case.

We can probably afford to have two ways of looking up IDNs.  We 
cannot afford a tug-of-war in this group that delays adoption of
any solution.

--

What I'd really like to see us work on is the transcribability problem.
This is a problem that all of the proposals have in common - there
are still too many similar glyphs with different code points that are not
folded by nameprep.  I see this as the biggest remaining problem that
must be solved before we can standardize an ACE lookup scheme for IDNs.
(even if we standardize an alternate one later that uses UTF-8 or some
other encoding)

Keith