Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

"D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote:

> > I don't see how this is an ACE failure.
>
> You don't see that it's a failure?  Or you don't see that the
> procedure succeeds if the ACE IDN is replaced by a normal domain name?

Of course it's a failure, but it's not an ACE failure, it's an IDN
failure.  The exact same failure would happen for any IDN in this
scenario regardless of whether ACE existed or not.

But there are other scenarios (like replying to a message, which is
even more common than cutting and pasting addresses) where ACE will not
fail, and any other encoding might (often would, given the popularity of
sendmail and BIND).

It's undeniable that ACE is more backward-compatible, and fails in fewer
instances, than any 8-bit encoding.  The only disagreement is how much
that additional backward compatibility is worth.  Some think it's worth
very little.  Others think it's worth a lot.  Fine.  Let some people
work on standards for ACE, and some people work on standards for UTF-8,
and if you're right about ACE being worthless, then the ACE standards
will get ignored.

AMC