Re: [idn] WG last call summary

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes:
> 3) contrary to some beliefs, watching gobbledygook is not known to cause 
> permanent damage in human beings.

Internationalized domain names are a failure if non-ASCII glyphs don't
appear on the screen. Have you completely lost sight of the goal here?

The interoperability problems begin when IDNA gobbledygook is converted
to the local character encoding for display. If the result is copied to
another program---through pipes, copy-and-paste, whatever---then that
program's lookups will fail. Mail will bounce, web links will fail, etc.

The conversions I'm talking about are specified in the IDNA documents.
They will produce interoperability problems visible on the wire. You are
incorrect in saying that this is outside the IETF's scope.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago