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

["Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com>]

> 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.

Yes.

> 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.

Future applications will want to be totally internationalized from the
ground up, without any legacy crap in the soup. Ease-of-deployment in
programming and operating environments where UTF-8 is easily accessed.
Overall "servicability" of DNS, where problems with UTF-8 will be much
simpler to analyze than similar problems with ACE. More to the point,
however, it does not need to be "justified" if there is a sufficient
amount of interest from knowledgable people, which there is.

And while it would be nice to have the just-send-UTF8 camp recognize the
merits of ACE, it would also be nice to have the ACE-only camp recognize
that many of their peers find some measurable amount of merit in UTF-8.

> We can probably afford to have two ways of looking up IDNs.

There have been many proposals for a dual-mode approach, and this should
illustrate that many folks recognize the merits of both camps already. And
if it is done right, it doesn't suffer from compromise syndrome, since
folks can deploy the one they wish without suffering any real penalties
(you can only-send-ACE or just-send-UTF8, as you choose, although it would
be self-defeating to ignore half the benefits). And we can do it cheaply.

If we can at least agree to work on a dual-mode approach -- even if we
think the other half is nuts -- we will get the kinks worked out that much
faster and to everyone's benefit.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/