[idn] 7 bits forever!

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

Keith Moore writes:
> IDNA is designed to maximize the rate at which IDNs can be deployed.

I hereby declare that cs.utk.edu is an IDN. We will now spend twenty
years trying to convince all application programs to display it as the
international picture of an ostrich with his head in the sand.

Look, Keith, we've deployed an IDN in zero time! Infinite rate! You
didn't even have to touch your DNS records!

Boy, I'm glad that, when you faced the much smaller problem of non-ASCII
subject lines back in 1991, you and your buddies decided to ``maximize
the rate'' of deployment by inventing your own encoding mechanisms,
rather than giving in to the demands of 8-bit transparency. Oh, sure, we
still have quite a few display failures eleven years later, and users in
Europe are constantly sending raw ISO 8859-1 in violation of your 7-bit
requirement, and sendmail still has problems with UTF-8, and now we're
facing years of IDNA pain followed by years of IDNA-MAILBOX pain, but
you were able to _instantaneously_ deploy Quoted-Printable back in 1991,
and that's what matters! Brilliant!

Even better, your incisive design decisions mean that billions of people
will be able to continue using their 36-bit computers, which, as you
know, are incapable of processing character data in units other than 7
bits, because 36 is not divisible by 8, but it is divisible by 7, um,
well, except for the remainder of 1, but who's counting? The point is,
Keith, THANK YOU! You've made all our lives so much better! I hope
someday you can travel to Taiwan and meet some of your fans.

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