Subject: Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?

From: Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 16:37:48 +0100

At 19.22 +0900 01-01-03, Martin J. Duerst wrote:
>As I said, web browsers support it, and they are the most important
>clients for multilingual domain names. Also, conversion from
>UTF-16 or UCS-4 to UTF-8 is very simple and has been implemented
>dozens of times. The ACE proposals I have looked at are quite a bit
>more complicated, and there is rarely much code yet.

Martin, code exists in many places already for ACE, and the 
troublesome part of all of this will still be the nameprep part which 
have to be done regardless of UTF-8 or *ACE encodings.

Existing implementations of UTF-8 will not be possible to use, so we 
have to update quite some amount of code regardless of what solution 
is chosen.

Also, I want you to please differentiate between implementations of 
standards and the standards themselves. RFC 821 took 6 years to 
clearify in RFC 2821...

     paf

-- 
Patrik Fältström <[email-masked]>       Internet Engineering Task Force
Area Director, Applications Area                   http://www.ietf.org
Phone: (Stockholm) +46-8-4494212            (San Jose) +1-408-525-0940
        PGP: 2DFC AAF6 16F0 F276 7843  2DC1 BC79 51D9 7D25 B8DC

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From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 01:03:43 +0900

At 01/01/03 16:37 +0100, Patrik F$BgM(Btstr$B‹N(B wrote:
>Existing implementations of UTF-8 will not be possible to use, so we have 
>to update quite some amount of code regardless of what solution is chosen.

Nameprep is needed at one or two crucial points; for the rest,
off-the-shelf UTF-8 tools can be used.

>standards and the standards themselves. RFC 821 took 6 years to clearify 
>in RFC 2821...

Well, UTF-8 is also being clarified; some clarifications happened
just recently. I'd hope we could avoid the same timespan for ACE.
If all the intellectual energy that currently went into various
ACE proposals went into upgrading protocols and implementations
for UTF-8, we would already be quite a bit ahead.

Regards,   Martin.