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

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 20:58 26/08/00, J. William Semich wrote:
>1. It has designated UTF-8 as the preferred protocol for IDN in the BCP,
>RFC 2277 (No matter whether used in a Standard or in a BCP, the word "MUST"
>looks like strong language to me);

        RFC-2277 says NOTHING about "UTF-8 as the preferred protocol (sic)
for IDN".  The rest of us have read RFC-2277 by now and aren't
going to be fooled.  In any event, UTF-8 is an encoding, not
a protocol.  Please stop saying this.

>2. It has actually set a standard for (or has put on a standards track)
>UTF-8 itself under RFC 2279.

Not quite.  RFC-2279 provides the standards-track document for the
use of UTF-8 as an encoding for MIME-compliant electronic mail.
To quote the first paragraph of Section 5 in RFC-2279:

   This memo is meant to serve as the basis for registration of a MIME
   character set parameter (charset) [CHARSET-REG].  The proposed
   charset parameter value is "UTF-8".  This string labels media types
   containing text consisting of characters from the repertoire of
   ISO/IEC 10646 including all amendments at least up to amendment 5
   (Korean block), encoded to a sequence of octets using the encoding
   scheme outlined above.  UTF-8 is suitable for use in MIME content
   types under the "text" top-level type.

Now using the metric in RFC-2279, virtually ANY character set in use 
is compliant with an IETF standard since there is a MIME "charset" value 
for almost every character set in significant use on this planet.

>So, apart from the fact that UTF-8 has much to recommend it technically for
>use in IDNs, is it so surprising that the decision would be made to use
>UTF-8 in the protocol when developing an implementation of IDN?

Bill,

        You keep missing the entire point.  UTF-8 might have technical
advantages.  Please DO talk about those.  Please DO NOT bring
up political/social/non-technical discussions as you incessantly
have done on this list.  The WG Chair has asked you to desist
as have numerous WG members.  Please oblige us and refocus your
commentary on technical discussions. :-)

Ran
rja@inet.org