Subject: Re: [idn] Alpha Online

From: Dan Oscarsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 07 Feb 2002 14:57:01 +0100

Dan Bernstein wrote:

>Case insensitivity is quite a bit of added work for implementors, and it
>dramatically expands the number of opportunities for visual confusion,
>as well as the severity of the confusion. The only counterargument is
>the unjustified speculation that users are too stupid to handle a world
>of case-sensitive names---even though URLs are already case-sensitive,
>specifically in path names.

I have had case insensitivity in my software from the beginning. It is
not
hard work. Very easy.
My web server is case insensitive in the URL path names. Much easier for
the user that way. The URLs can use mixed case to make the easier
to read, but the user can enter them in any way.

Case sensitivity does increase confusion for the user. When you speak
the case of letters are not heard so the user do not know what to type.
Many use mixed case to enhance readability, but when search for a match,
case should be ignored. An example on the case sensitive confusion:
in Unix the file names are case sensitive, and you can have a Makefile
and a makefile. And both two will be searched by make which selects
one before the other. Depending on how you sort your filenames, you
might not even see that you have two makefiles and therefore not
understand why things do not work because the wrong one is used
by make.

   Dan

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 7 Feb 2002 17:49:28 -0000

Dan Oscarsson writes:
> not hard work. Very easy.

We're not talking about folding A-Z into a-z. We're talking about case
insensitivity for _Unicode_. Case insensitivity for _internationalized_
domain names requires quite a bit of extra code in many programs.

Consider, for example, a system administrator telling his MTA ``accept
mail for pi.cr.yp.to'' with a Greek pi. Case insensitivity for IDNs
means that the MTA also has to accept mail for Pi.cr.yp.to.

(Of course, Costello is still denying that MTAs, DNS servers, etc. are
affected by IDNA at all, because Costello refuses to acknowledge that
these programs have user interfaces.)

Interoperability requires that we continue folding A-Z into a-z inside
domain names. But it doesn't require insensitivity for non-ASCII names.

> When you speak

``Capital T, lowercase e, capital X.''

Typical users avoid all these hassles by consistently using lowercase,
contrary to the claims made by certain people on this mailing list. For
example, someone here said that we needed uppercase because the World
Health Organization was ``much easier to recognize'' as WHO.org than as
who.org; but the WHO web site consistently uses lowercase who.int.

Anyway, (1) your notion of speakability is contrary to the entire
concept of IDNs, and (2) I don't see you telling the standardization
groups for UNIX, URLs, French, etc. that you demand insensitivity.

---Dan