Re: [idn] WG last call summary

["Adam M. Costello" <idn.amc+0@nicemice.net.RemoveThisWord>]

"Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote:

> To repeat myself for the record, I think that the IDNA
> transfer-encoding portion is necessary to provide legacy applications
> with access to resources in the IDN namespace.  What I am specifically
> arguing against is transliteration.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by transliteration.  In IDNA there
are two transformations that can be applied to labels: ToASCII, which
forces a label to ASCII (performing ACE encoding if necessary), and
ToUnicode, which undoes the ACE encoding if present.

Are you saying that ToASCII is good, and ToUnicode is bad?

I can imagine a world with ToASCII but without ToUnicode.  If a
non-ASCII name came to you via new protocols that support non-ASCII
names directly, then you'd see the human-friendly form.  But if the name
traversed an old protocol (at any point), you'd see the ACE.

I don't see how doing away with ToUnicode would solve any problem.  The
main danger is non-ASCII names getting accidentally fed to old software.
Even without ToUnicode, non-ASCII names would still be out there (being
carried around by the new protocols and new applications), and it would
still be possible for them to get pasted or piped into old programs.

AMC