Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

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

> Give me one example where it fails. Just one.

I'll give two.

1. an email message gets delivered to a flat file which is read by 
a user agent.  the process that delivers the message has no idea
whether the user agent can support native IDNs or not, and this
is subject to change at any time. 

2. an HTML document is saved in a flat file on a disk.  the process
that saves the file has no idea whether every browser that will ever
be asked to read that file can properly support IDNs.

and you're dreaming if you think that folks are going to add
explicit IDN negotiation even into those protocols that have
the ability to negotiate options.  option negotiation 
tends to add complexity and additional failure modes that 
make diagnosing and fixing bugs more difficult (because they
increase the complexity of the case analysis). the more
options you add to a protocol, the worse it gets.
on-the-fly format conversion adds it own set of problems.

Ketih