Subject: Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 16:41:12 -0500

>> >required for ACE to work perfectly (including display).  What I see is
>> that
>> >applications are already having some trouble going from ASCII and 
local
>> >encoding to UTF.  ACE in essence requires the conversion from local

>> means that a later transition from ACE to UTF-8 wouldn't reduce the
>> complexity much (you'd still need to talk to ACE-based servers).
>>
>There are no ACE-based servers.  the current servers can already handle 
ACE!

Fine.  But you were talking about the complexity on the client side.  A 
UTF-8 transition would add complexity on the client, not reduce it, 
because the client would then have two cases to consider: servers that 
support UTF-8, and those that don't.

/==============================================================\
|John Stracke                    |Principal Engineer           |
[email-masked]   |Incentive Systems, Inc.      |
|http://www.incentivesystems.com |My opinions are my own.      |
|==============================================================|
|The Net regards censorship as damage, and routes around it. --|
|John Gilmore                                                  |
\==============================================================/

---

From: "Edmon Chung" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 17:02:30 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Stracke" <[email-masked]>
> support UTF-8, and those that don't.

You are right if you are talking about end-end-user apps.  But think about
the apps required for managing DNS / email servers / registries / ... etc.
Any app EXCEPT the end-end-user apps (such as the browser or nslookup tools)
will NOT have to do ACE.  If they are trying to access an old server which
have no IDN support, it will use ASCII, be it ACE or regular English
alphanumeric.  If they connect to IDN aware servers, they will use
IDN(UTF8).  If the receive information from IDN servers they simply use the
UTF8 data (or ACE data) as is without any further encoding/decoding.

Which mean http servers / smtp servers / etc. will only deal with IDNs as
IDNs if they were IDN(UTF8) and continue to treat ACE as ASCII just as if
they were encountering an English alphanumeric domain.

Edmon