Re: [idn] IDNA interoperability failures, once again

[Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT>]

On Feb 13, "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote:

 >Please look up the word ``assumption'' at m-w.com. I did not say that
 >everyone uses LANG=en_US.UTF-8. I explicitly restricted attention to
 >that locale, because it's a locale where the programs under discussion
 >_can_ display IDNs properly.
And my point is that assuming wide deployment of UTF-8 (like you do in
http://cr.yp.to/proto/idn.html) is pointless, because such a thing does
not exist and will not exist in the near future, at least in most of
Europe and in the UNIX community of Japan (I do not know about windows
users).

 >The point of this thread is that the IDNA deployment plan will cause
 >interoperability failures: in particular, mail will bounce. Until the
 >IDNA proponents can explain how to fix these problems in _one_ modern
 >Unicode-aware locale, there's no point in considering other locales.
This has already been discussed to death on this mailing list and I feel
I do not have anything new to add.

 >> some national charset like ISO-8859-1 or KOI8-R
 >Converting UTF-8 to KOI8-R is unreliable, obviously. The reason we want
 >the world to settle on Unicode is to eliminate such problems. Has it
Maybe you want this, but most of the world does not feel the need to use
unicode instead of their usual national charsets and does not want to
experience the interoperability problems of such a change.

 >never occurred to you that some Russian users want to see non-KOI8-R
 >characters? Or that some Europeans want to see non-8859-1 characters?
Yes, I've met on the network a few people with this need, but they are
not at all representative of the users of their country.

-- 
ciao,
Marco