Re: [idn] NSI Multilingual Testbed Information (fwd)

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

--On Sunday, 27 August, 2000 00:32 -0400 "J. William Semich"
<bill@mail.nic.nu> wrote:

>...
> 2. The proposed ACE solutions are not ASCII-transparent at all.
> In contrast, UTF-8 is completely
> ASCII-transparent.
>...

Bill,

Regardless of other issues here:

(i) I suggest that "completely ASCII-transparent" implies that no
octets ever appear with the high-order bit turned on, i.e., that
the mechanism in question will not have negative impact on
programs that enforce "ASCII characters only" rules.  UTF-8
certainly does not have that property.

(ii) For the DNS, the more relevant principle is probably
"traditional applications norms for names" -transparent, i.e.,
the technique will not have negative impact on programs that
enforce the case-independent A-Z, plus digits, plus hyphen
appearing mid-label rule.

If what you mean by "completely ASCII transparent" is that ASCII
characters have the same coding in UTF-8 that they do in "normal"
ASCII, that is a different sort of matter.  But many people
believe the particular bias that implies is one of the
unfortunate properties of UTF-8 insofar as it give a rather
distinct coding advantage to English and other languages that use
a traditional Roman alphabet without diacriticals or character
symbols missing from US English.

     john