Subject: Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 13:16:50 -0500

> > > In the IDNA proposal we have specified that an application which
> > > handle IDNA (like you seem to say that the browser is) only
> > > support IDNA if also the content of the clipboard is converted
> > > to ACE before the domainname is passed to other applications
> > > (which doesn't handle IDNA/ACE solution).
> >
> >In that case IDNA is impossible. It is impossible for a browser to
> >know what text in a web page is a host name.
> 
> Not true. ACE names are quite easy to pick out of document content:
> they have the name prefixes.

This assumes that it wasn't written and stored in transliterated form. I
would think that the native format will be the most common for
user-written material (especially email bodies), not ACE. This goes
against the original argument. Requiring these products to encode email
addresses as ACE will be difficult, if not impossible. Every string that
looked like an email address which really wasn't an email address (this
goes into the realm of document contents; passwords can have [email-masked]
syntax, for example) would be broken by the converter.

For HTML with links, URLs will require ACE for some time, so the argument
is more valid there (at least until HTML makes the URL guessing invalid).
But for things like HTML lists of POP3 servers which do not have common or
widely-used URLs, it once again becomes difficult for an agent to
automatically convert native-format hostnames into ACE.

I really don't think a mandatory look-alike conversion will work. The
strongest emphasis I would put on it would be MAY, with a strong caveat.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

---

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 10:37:48 -0700

At 1:26 PM +0200 7/23/01, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
>Patrik said:
>  >In the IDNA proposal we have specified that an application which handle
>>IDNA (like you seem to say that the browser is) only support IDNA if also
>>the content of the clipboard is converted to ACE before the domainname is
>>passed to other applications (which doesn't handle IDNA/ACE solution).
>>
>
>In that case IDNA is impossible. It is impossible for a browser to know
>what text in a web page is a host name.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 14:58:28 -0400

> they have the name prefixes.

actually, ACE names are far easier to pick out of a document than
UTF-8 names.  while we have conventions for which characters are
allowable (for many applications) in an ASCII name (letters, digits,
hypens embedded within a label), we no such conventions for UTF-8 names.

Keith

---

From: Dan Oscarsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 13:26:25 +0200 (MEST)

Patrik said:

>--On 01-07-18 06.46 +0000 "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
>> What went wrong is that the browser displayed the address as Unicode
>> characters. The address then passed through the (CTEXT UTF-8, although
>> UTF8_STRING would be better) copy-and-paste mechanism, the UTF-8 xterm,
>> the mail client, and the 8-bit-clean MTA, none of which converted back
>> to ACE. The resulting UTF-8 DNS lookup produced NXDOMAIN.
>

In that case IDNA is impossible. It is impossible for a browser to know
what text in a web page is a host name. A host name can occur anywhere in
the text of a document. And I can cut and paste any part of it.
It will be impossible or a browser to identify what parts are host names
and ACE encode them.
Also quite confusing for a user if it should happen, because when they
copy and paste a host name from the browser into a mail application the
pasted text is suddenly totally different.

   Dan

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From: "David R. Conrad" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 12:50:25 -0700

Hi,

At 02:58 PM 7/23/2001 -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
>UTF-8 names.

I thought the point of UTF-8 was that you wouldn't need to.

Rgds,
-drc

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From: David Hopwood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 23:26:17 +0100

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

> they have the name prefixes.

You're going to rely on the dq-- or whatever prefix to find names in free
text? Now I like IDNA even less than I did before.

IMHO, finding names in free text is excessively complicated, probably
unreliable, and should not be attempted. It *is* practical to define
special cut and paste behaviour for specific well-defined contexts (like
RFC 2822 headers and browser location bars, for example), because an
application can use specially designed widgets for display and editing
in those contexts. Such widgets can also help users to type valid names
(by doing what Dan Bernstein calls "fast nameprep", although speed is
not the main advantage).

Trying to do anything more complicated than that to make cut and paste
work is simply a bad idea.

- -- 
David Hopwood <[email-masked]>

Home page & PGP public key: http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hopwood/
RSA 2048-bit; fingerprint 71 8E A6 23 0E D3 4C E5  0F 69 8C D4 FA 66 15 01
Nothing in this message is intended to be legally binding. If I revoke a
public key but refuse to specify why, it is because the private key has been
seized under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act; see www.fipr.org/rip

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From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 15:43:49 +0900

At 13:16 01/07/23 -0500, Eric A. Hall wrote:

[Paul Hoffman wrote:]

>against the original argument.

And please let's not forget: There is at least one form where
if things are going to work, ACE won't be used. That's paper.
If anybody is so stupid to buy an IDN to put its ACE on paper,
s/he can of course do that, but I doubt that's what many
people would want to do.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 17:07:49 +1000

> s/he can of course do that, but I doubt that's what many

	Just same way as they don't put the real numbers after
	1 800 SOMENUMBER (1 800 7663686237).  It they want you
	to contact them then the ace form is quite likely to
	be there as well.

	Mark
--
Mark Andrews, Nominum Inc.
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 08:20:51 -0400

nobody is going to expect people to type in an ACE name.
if they want to be reached by anybody who doesn't speak the
native dialect, or who doesn't have IDN support, they're 
going to have an ASCII DNS name, at least as an alternative
to the IDN.

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 09:17:47 -0400

>going to have an ASCII DNS name, at least as an alternative

I agree with your point, but not the way you wrote it. It is more than 
possible than the user shown choices would be:
- an ascii domain name as today
- the idn represented with the right script (not shown in ace).

but, as many were saying since more than 2 years now, the ace encoding will 
leak in many places.

So I would say that people will try to avoid it, but in the run, we will 
expose it, which is bad.

ace has good advantages, but also drawbacks. we don't live in a perfect world.
Just has to find the least pain...
(and the least pain is not yet a concensus in this wg...).

Marc.

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 09:27:45 -0400

> but, as many were saying since more than 2 years now, the ace encoding will

right.  I was talking about deliberate exposure of an ACE, not accidental
exposure of an ACE.  I don't think that many people will deliberately 
show people ACE names (say on a business card) and expect people to
type them in.  They'll either show the native form of the name, or they'll
show an ASCII DNS name, or both.

Keith

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From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 17:39:31 +0200

> show an ASCII DNS name, or both.

Just to continue this discussion in absurdum:

I don't want to be forced to register more than one domainname. Why should
I register something in US-ASCII only when we have IDN? I am not interested
in paying some registry and ISP for hosting an extra domain just because
some people can not type in adiaeresis. I rather expose the ACE and let
people fight with it (ugly as it is).

   paf

---

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 12:10:30 -0400

>people fight with it (ugly as it is).

a per-user choice.
I would guess the opposite (i.e. two domain names: one pure ascii and one 
full-idn (without showing the ace equivalent) ,
but who knows the future...

Marc.

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 12:44:38 -0400

> people fight with it (ugly as it is).

it's your choice, of course.  my guess is that most folks will choose the
opposite (if they want to be reachable by non-natives)

Keith

---

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 11:29:04 -0700

At 12:10 PM -0400 7/24/01, Marc Blanchet wrote:
>I would guess the opposite (i.e. two domain names: one pure ascii 
>and one full-idn (without showing the ace equivalent) ,

That's easy for someone whose company name makes reasonable sense in 
pure ASCII to say. Telling Chinese and Indian speakers that they must 
register a domain name in pure ASCII is quite different. Romanization 
works poorly for many languages; few Americans and Europeans realize 
that.

--Paul Hoffman, Director

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 15:15:04 -0400

> register a domain name in pure ASCII is quite different. 

nobody has suggested that this be done.

in general, an organization that has an IDN in one language or script
might find it useful to have other IDNs in other langauges or scripts -
so that it can be reached by more people.  Having a pure-ASCII IDN
as one of those alternate IDNs is just a special case of this - one 
that I expect will be fairly common.

---

From: "Deven Kalra" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 13:15:47 -0700

Paul:

You have an interesting point. I can definitely speak for the Indian
scenario.

As you might know, Indian languages share a common derivation. Northern
Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit/Devanagri. Similarly southern
Indian languages share a common heritage. This is complicated by the fact
that southern Indian languages use many sanskrit words though they write
them in their own scripts.

Because of the British influence in India, almost every Indian language has
developed a romanization. Names of people and places are commonly written
both in the romanized form and the native script form. Because the same
words are used in multiple languages, the romanized forms are quite similar
if not same. For example, namaskar.com will be transliterated or romanized
in the same for in Hindi and Gujarati. Therefore, if we provide the ascii
name by default to the the Hindi namaskar.com, the gujarati will not have
any ascii
form.

I think part of the problem is that we are thinking of the problem in a very
English oriented manner. In my opinion, one of the big reasons that people
will want to get IDN is because they want their customers/users to be able
to be able to use their language. The fact that people should be able to
reach their site through ascii is a nice to have but not either a motivation
or a barrier to get the IDN.

One part of the solution will be to provide people tools to enter the data
in thier language on any platform without requiring excessive localization
or major software rehaul so they are not forced to type ascii to get to a
website if it has and IDN.

Deven
---------------
Langoo.com / Langoo.net
The Source for Multilingual Products and Services

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
Paul Hoffman / IMC
Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 11:29 AM
To: Marc Blanchet; [email-masked]
Subject: Re: ace leaking (was: Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth)

--Paul Hoffman, Director

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:12:40 +0900

At 11:29 01/07/24 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>That's easy for someone whose company name makes reasonable sense in pure 
>ASCII to say. Telling Chinese and Indian speakers that they must register 
>a domain name in pure ASCII is quite different. Romanization works poorly 
>for many languages; few Americans and Europeans realize that.

Yes, romanization works quite purely for some languages. Many Chinese
sites for example use mostly numeric names. But even where romanization
(or whatever else is currently used in these places) works purely, it will
work much better than openly exposed ACE, in many if not most cases.
Of course that doesn't mean everybody should be forced to get an ASCII
name, but we should at least assume that many will.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:36:20 +0900

>Just to continue this discussion in absurdum:

Hello Patrick - I'm not sure there is anything absurd in this
discussion. I very much agree with Keith. Deliberate exposure
of ace (if we go for ace) will be rare if not very rare.

>people fight with it (ugly as it is).

You may want to do that because you know how things work, and you don't
care if other people have problems reaching you because you get too much
email anyway. But for people who want to get reached by their business
partners, I very much agree with Keith and others that they may want
an ASCII address.

Also, it may be that some more people using Latin script may not want
another address because they feel that there is no natural boundary
(or there shouldn't be) between ASCII and the rest of Latin. It may
be difficult for them to understand, or to want to admit, that a few
of the letters they use should be more difficult to enter. Indeed
I guess you don't put your downgraded spelling of Faltstrom on your
business card, besides the full spelling or on the other side of it.
On the other hand, people in Japan or in the Arabic countries,... are
very much aware that the rest of the world doesn't read their
letters, so they will be much more inclined for a double registration.

A separate reason for double registration in cases like yours may be
preemptive registration because you don't want anybody else to get
faltstrom.

Regards,   Martin.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 22:42:17 -0500

Please forgive a minor distraction, but it occurs to me that the ACE vs. 
UTF-8 debate has UTF-8 positioned inaccurately..

ACE is purported to be ugly because it translates clean data into an ASCII 
form.

By contrast, UTF-8 is purported to be better because it is 8-bit clean.

Indeed, it IS 8-bit clean, but the source UTF table needs more than 8 bits.

In other words, UTF-8 plays havoc with encoding rules, in order to work 
with an 8-bit model.  As such, some characters take 8-bits, but some take 
24, no?

In other words, UTF-8 also requires a special encoding pass, albeit one 
that maps the data to 8-bit chunks rather than ASCII chunks.  But it 
appears to be no more pure or direct than ASCII.

At the same time, UTF-8 requires more of the infrastructure to be upgraded 
before there is much utility for iDN.  ACE requires less.

Please do provide a counter-explanation, folks.  I'll be honestly delighted 
to be wrong about this assessment, as long as the 'wrong' is in technical 
terms from a system-wide perspective.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker  <mailto:[email-masked]>
Brandenburg InternetWorking  <http://www.brandenburg.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253;  fax +1.408.273.6464

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:39:53 -0500

this mini-debate about registering multiple domain names is really about 
marketing.  less grandly, it is about convenience for the people you 
communicate with.

an organization will choose whatever set of domain name strings it deems 
helpful for communicating with various audiences.    organizations have 
been doing this a long time and there is nothing really special about 
domain names, in this regard...  as long as we do not impose peculiar 
requirements on them.

So,

At 10:39 AM 7/24/2001, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>  I am not interested in paying some registry and ISP for hosting an extra 
> domain just because

is offset by earlier comments about difficulty in finding the right 
keystrokes for generating the characters, and your own desire for a way to 
type a japanese iDN without having to know how to generate the japanese 
characters.

The point is that domain holders will (and do) pay attention to the 
conveniences of those who must type their domain names.  Those wishing 
maximum ease will choose a range of names.

Just as there is www.ca.gov and www.state.ca.us, there will be (multiple 
domain names in multiple character sets, for the same organization.)

An entirely different matter would be this standards body doing anything 
that required or prevented that choice.

d/

d/

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 20:06:16 -0400

> By contrast, UTF-8 is purported to be better because it is 8-bit clean.

UTF-8 is purported to be better largely on the assumption that everything
else in the world either already uses, or will soon use UTF-8 anyway.  
I could be wrong, but I don't share that assumption.  

Keith

p.s. what does it mean for a character set to be "8-bit clean", anyway?

---

From: "Gary Krall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 18:12:52 -0700

Dave:

This is an excellent point.  In the original spirit of the internet users
should be given choices and they should have the flexibility to select the
appropriate solution for them.  In that regard if a company wants to
register both ML as well as ASCII names and how they want to create the
ASCII names should be up to them.

Patrik's proposal, if I understand it, of letting users with use the ACE
representation does provide an option for  ASCII "only" users.  But, as
Patrik points out is quite "ugly" given the current "bq--xxxx" structure.
Instead, a company can make a much better choice of how to create
alternatives for their in language names.  For example if a domain is "täg"
a company may want to regsiter the ASCII domain "taag" and provide both
alternatives as links to their domain.

But the point that Patrik makes about not forcing people to regsiter
multiple domain names just because they need a ML name is well taken.  IMHO,
a correct solution would be to solve the basic problem of being able to
input mulitlingual characters on any platform without requiring multilingual
OS support.  Software such as this that would co-exist within an ASCII
infrastucture and enable users the ability to input ML characters might be
worth considering.

Gary.

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 19:00:12 -0500

>Patrik points out is quite "ugly" given the current "bq--xxxx" structure.

Patrik was not making a proposal, simply because the ascii version of the 
iDN string will exist and we cannot control how people spread it around and 
use it.

On the other hand, yes, there will be people who are entirely satisfied 
with that as their only ascii version of domain name.

d/

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