Re: An idn protocol for consideration in making the requirements

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 02:01 PM 2/1/00 +0100, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
>I see it as very important that we do NOT allow the solution to
>be encoded in ASCII! It is time everybody learns to deal with the
>problems of having more then the ascii subset.

Since we are discussing requirements, could you state your reason for this? 
What is the strong advantage of having a non-ASCII *encoding* for 
internationalized names on the wire as long as the rest of the requirements 
are met?

Personally, I believe that if we come up with a compatible encoding for the 
full set of internationalized characters, the software industry will rush 
to make input and display mechanisms for the encoding. The desire for 
internationalization is just too strong for them to ignore it.

>ASCII compatibility and backward compatibility is good, if it does
>not make things bad for everybody where ascii is not enough.
>It is better to break software and get them fixed instead of
>still trying to make everything to work in a world as it was
>at the dawn of the computer age.

I fundamentally disagree with this last sentence for two reasons:
- You have not shown that you need to break software in order to fix the 
problem of lack of internationalization
- It is never a good idea to break the existing base of software, 
particularly when you are talking about breaking a wide variety of 
protocols across many levels of the Internet architecture. You should only 
do this when there is no other viable alternative.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium