RE: [idn] Domain names and ASCII compatibility

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

At 11:25 AM 3/15/00 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>If we had specific proposals for how to move every protocol that cannot 
>handle UTF-8 today to being UTF-8-friendly, we could look at this option 
>and compare it to the other options. But we don't. Making up a name for 
>solution for one of the protocols affected without even presenting an 
>Internet Draft, much less an RFC agreed on by the experts on that topic, is 
>not sufficient.
>
>The WG charter at <http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/idn-charter.html> says:
>
>"A fundamental requirement in this work is to not disturb the current use 
>and operation of the domain name system..."
>
>The term "current use" seems pretty clear, and unilaterally breaking the 
>implementations of  many fundamental Internet protocols could be considered 
>a significant disturbance. Similarly, "operation" seems pretty clear, and 
>saying that everyone who wants an internationalized domain name must in 
>fact get a second "fallback" name for use for an undisclosed period of time 
>could be considered a pretty significant disturbance.


It should be noted that I objected to this language in the charter from the
beginning, and still believe we need to change it in Adelaide. It is
fundamentally impossible to move to a fully-functional idn and *not* have
some (already broken) applications disfunction on the Internet. This
language - "the current use and operation" - is too inclusive to be
meaningful.

As suggested by the Asian task force in its posting of March 4th, this
language is unfairly biased toward supporting non-standard or broken
implementations currently in place, and not towards supporting "current
protocols," which is more appropriate.

Bill Semich
.NU Domain