Re: [idn] Comments on protocol drafts

[C C Magnus Gustavsson <mag@lysator.liu.se>]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2000, John C Klensin wrote:

> If the test fails, then it seems to me that one is essentially 
> making a "my language is more important than his language, and 
> will be forever" argument.   Again, that might be a plausible 
> argument (although I'd be embarrassed to make it in public), 
> but, if people want to make it, let's not try to hide it 
> (however unintentionally) behind "minimal or constant codings 
> for ASCII" arguments.

Well, thanks a lot for those accusations. You're quite wrong though.

The ONLY language that argument has been used for so far is English.
It seems few Americans are embarrassed for that though. I have not
said a single word, not one, about how non-ASCII Latin-1 characters
should be encoded. I seems to me that you have no reason at all to
accuse me of arguing that my language is more important.

What I have been talking about is ASCII and ASCII only. Obviously we
have no other alternatives here but to leave ASCII untouched and thus
to be treated better than others. It wasn't I who came up with that
requirement. I just argue that, if so, ASCII should never be touched.
It doesn't matter what encoding you use. It's a win only situation.

For example, in the Hoffman example we could adopt the simple solution
to reserve two characters for switching between ASCII and base32. That
would save a lot of bytes for languages which uses mostly ASCII. Yet
no other language will have lost a thing by this. Nothing. They will
still be encoded exactly the same way. Encoding ASCII with base32 is
not a tradeoff. It's just a waste.

I would like to see an example of where my requirement could possibly
be a bad thing. Until then, I think it's is a good one, for everybody.

/Magnus