Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

--On 01-07-19 16.47 +0900 Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org> wrote:

> Adam - Some people working on UTF-8 standards (or trying to suggest
> such work) have been told that this would not be possible to happen
> in this WG. Nobody on the ACE side has been told thus. This is quite
> asymmetric.

Reason for this is that ACE is backward compatible with the standards we
already have, such as RFC 2821 and RFC 2822. If we have a solution which
points at UTF-8 as the transport, then the RFC's specifying the application
layer protocols have to be updated -- and proper handshake (if needed) and
downgrade to ascii encoding (if needed) is defined.

I.e. the problem with using non-ascii in the labels in DNS, is that it is
really easy to get what I would call leakage into the application layer
protocols which can not handle other characters than ASCII.

How to handle Unicode and how to reach the goal of using UTF-8 encoding in
the future is something I rather see each wg which have knowledge about the
specific protocol. Regardless of how easy or hard it is.

  paf