Re: [idn] phasing out ACE

[Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>]

On 1 Apr 2002, D. J. Bernstein wrote:

>Next I suppose you'll claim that RFC 2277, which requires UTF-8 support
>for text in all protocols, can't possibly exist.

Quoting from RFC2277:

>This document does not mandate a policy on name internationalization, but
>requires that all protocols describe whether names are internationalized
>or US-ASCII.
>
>[...]
>
>A "name" is an identifier such as a person's name, a hostname, a
>domainname, a filename or an E-mail address; it is often treated as an
>identifier rather than as a piece of text, and is often used in
>protocols as an identifier for entities, without surrounding text.

RFC2277 does not apply to domain names or DNS's encoding of them.
Evidently the people who wrote the above part foresaw the problems
associated with requiring full language and charset tagging functionality
for names which, most of the time, are treated like opaque strings of
bytes anyway. They understood that a whole lot of names exist in current
protocols, and that they cannot possibly all be expected to migrate to
UTF-8.

Besides, even if RFC2277 *did* apply, it is acknowledged that deviation
from its requirements are possible within the BCP0009 section 9.1 variance
procedure. Here, for well known reasons of compression efficiency and
ASCII compatibility, variant procedure would be easily justified.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2