Re: [idn] WG last call summary

[Paul Robinson <paul@iconoplex.co.uk>]

On Mar 18, "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote:

> More importantly, in the absence of consensus, the status quo wins.
> Something is seriously wrong when an internationalization proposal draws
> objections from hundreds of Chinese-speaking users, for example.

Now *that's* a convincing argument. However, the status quo in this case is
broken. OK, let me rephrase - it's broken for people in China who don't
understand the latin alphabet or who want their e-mail addresses outside of
USASCII 0-127. Something *should* be done, but your argument has a hint of
'I never want anything done, ever' about it, which is putting people off.

My current understanding is that the majority of debate appears to be about
interoperability with legacy applications - to me, it sounds a little like
the brain-dead 'we can't roll out IPv6 as it breaks IPv4' argument. In other
words, the code re-write and upgrde is going to have to happen sometime. You
just appear to want to put it off whilst we all sit around and procrastinate
for a while. History has shown this is not a Good Plan. However, the more I
start to re-read docs and think about it, the more I am convincing myself
that you may be right.

--
Paul Robinson