Re: [idn] WG last call summary

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

Pete Resnick writes:
> Inability to display non-US-ASCII glyphs by legacy
> applications is not a failure.

Go sell a Greek user an ``internationalized domain name'' with a delta,
Pete. Then tell him that most of his correspondents will see the delta
as incomprehensible gobbledygook rather than a delta. See what he says.

Of course, display failures are not as intolerable as interoperability
failures. But they're still failures.

The IDNA proposal, in attempting to limit these display failures,
creates interoperability failures that would not have occurred with
ASCII domain names. IDNA coauthor Adam Costello has already admitted
this. Surely you agree that bounced mail is serious!

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