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

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 09:59 27/08/00, J. William Semich wrote:

>"According to the BCP RFC 2277, the IETF has determined that UTF-8 is the
>strongly preferred CES to be used in a protocol which is being used for
>interchange of Internationalized character date."
>
>Again, to quote the RFC and not get *me* or my writing style into the picture:
>
>   Protocols MUST be able to use the UTF-8 charset, which consists of
>   the ISO 10646 coded character set combined with the UTF-8 character
>   encoding scheme, as defined in [10646] Annex R (published in
>   Amendment 2), for all text.

        Let me quote the APPLICABLE portion of RFC-2277, from Section 2,
which you keep pointedly ignoring:

   This document does not mandate a policy on name 
   internationalization, but requires that all protocols describe 
   whether names are internationalized or US-ASCII.

% Maybe my reading is wrong - fine.

        It is wrong.  Thank you for accepting that.  Lets please
move forward on technical discussion. :-)

>But if it is even close to being right, is it such an error 
>to have used the shorter term "IDN" when referring to that?

        Yes, it really is such an error, particularly when you repeat 
the same error more than once, several months AFTER the error was 
pointed out by several people, including (if memory serves) the
author of the RFC.

        Now I happen to think that UTF-8 (but NOT including "just send 
UTF-8") might have some good technical properties, but the case for
use of UTF-8 in IDNs needs to be made on technical grounds ignoring 
politics/policy/sociology/other.

ASIDE:
        For the record and to be clear, I'll observe that I consider 
"Just send UTF-8" and any close relatives to be total non-starters 
for interoperability reasons and for operational/deployment/transition 
reasons.

Ran
rja@inet.org