Re: [idn] compatibility chars in draft-ietf-idn-nameprep

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

>Whereas, someone who has an existing application which does almost
>no error checking and calls gethostbyname() will find it convenient
>to have that call convert from the locale 8-bit or multibyte character
>set and do the compatibility folding for them. If the resolver is
>in a dynamically linked library, the existing executable might work.

that's pretty unlikely to work in general.  existing applications aren't 
built to deal with 8-bit domain names, either in their parsing code or 
in their display routines or in the data formats that they exchange
with other applications.  overloading existing APIs with IDN semantics 
strikes me as a good way to break a large number of things at once.
applications that don't know about IDNs shouldn't have to see them.

Keith