RE: [idn] Re: An idn protocol for consideration in making the requirements

[ned.freed@innosoft.com]

> Somebody mentioned cultural sensitivity in this (sub)matter.
> Well, for those of you  that have not suffered through about
> a decade of "Q-P" I can tell you that 1) it is culturally
> very offensive, and 2) it is still leaking through in raw
> even in the most advanced e-mail clients now and then.

> No scheme that reencodes non-ASCII into ASCII will ever
> be culturally acceptable, since it will, I emphasise: WILL,
> leak trough to end users, for all future use, as ASCII text.

And what makes you think that raw UTF-8 will magically be properly displayed
and hence is somehow going to fare better? It won't be, I assure you.

> And still no-one has even made it plausible that some DNS
> servers will 'fall over and die' if presented with 8-bit
> data.  And if some DNS servers do, then they are so
> vulnarable to attack that they should be upgraded or
> decommissioned ASAP anyway.

AFAIK nobody ever made such a claim, so this is a complete strawman argument.
The issue isn't the DNS, it is applications that use the DNS. And nobody
claimed such applications will die either (although it is known that some very
old ones will). What is claimed is that applications will trash domain names in
UTF-8. And please don't try and tell me otherwise; I've seen it happen many
many times.

				Ned