RE: [idn] Domain names and ASCII compatibility

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

At 03:27 PM 3/15/00 -0500, J. William Semich wrote:
>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.

The charter is talking about *protocols*, not applications (WG chairs: 
please correct me if I'm wrong here). Broken applications are, thankfully, 
out of scope for this WG. Are you saying that you think "the current use 
and operation in protocols" 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.

Hmmmm. Their summary message to this mailing list said:

>Issue 4: The requirement should concern with protocol, not
>implementation.
>We refer to 2.1 paragraph 1, on the phrase "DNS interoperability".

That's referring to the requirements document, not to the charter. The 
requirements document was subsequently updated, and now reads:

>The DNS is essential to the entire Internet. Therefore, the protocol
>must not damage present DNS protocol interoperability. It must make the
>minimum number of changes to existing protocols on all layers of the
>stack.

There has been no proposals to amend that further, but the document is 
obviously still open for discussion.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium