Re: [idn] New protocol proposal: IDNRA

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

At 10:43 AM -0400 8/27/00, Marc Blanchet wrote:
>At/Ā 16:23 2000-08-27 +0200, Patrik Fältström you wrote/vous écriviez:
>>At 14.22 +0800 00-08-27, James Seng wrote:
>>
>>I wrote this draft together with Paul just because I feel that the 
>>transition period for _applications_ will be extremely long (~10 
>>years or more) so we definitly have to talk about the use of RACE 
>>encoded names being used as domainnames on buissness cards etc etc. 
>>I presume I (with swedish characters in my name, and therefore 
>>probably in future IDN domainnames) will have to have a 
>>double-sided buissness card for a looooong time, with proper 
>>characters on one side, and race encoded on the other.
>
>yeark!

I agree with your "yeark!" and not as much with Patrik. That's why 
good drafts have two authors who disagree somewhat with each other. 
:-)

However, I take a position nearer the middle of you two. I believe 
new companies that get IDN domains will probably *not* get non-IDN 
names for the use of people who have not updated: they'll expect 
people to update. And I would never put the UUAB (ugly, unreadable 
ASCII blob) on the back of my business card. I would simply say "if 
you want to communicate with me, upgrade if you haven't already". 
Note that companies that have domain names today will use their 
current and new ones until they think that everyone who wants to 
contact them has an IDN-capable application (probably just Web client 
and mail client). It is only new companies that need to think about 
going IDN-only, and I believe some of them will, particularly after 
the first year of deployment of new applications.

The last ten years of Internet experience has shown that this 
generally works well. Those of you who were active on the Internet 
about seven years ago remember the rapid and near-complete transition 
from gopher to HTTP that took place in less than two years.

Where Patrik and I differ is the length of time it will take for 90% 
of the people to upgrade their the applications that will use IDNs. I 
believe it will be more on the order of one year, not ten. Where he 
and I agree is that, if the IDN protocol requires that many DNS 
severs and caches need to be upgraded, getting to 90% might take ten 
years or more. (If you question this, look at the fact that over 10% 
of the DNS servers running BIND are still running version 4, even 
with all of its well-known security holes.)

People on this list have made a similar point on the semi-related 
topic of scripts that are not enterable on typical US/European 
keyboards: folks who use domain names in these scripts do not expect 
people with the "wrong" keyboards to use their domain names.

>in technical words, I don't think an ace encoding should be shown to 
>the user. should be completly transparent to the user. The only case 
>is for diagnostics purpose (as written in your draft). Same analogy 
>to me like using ip addresses in urls.

Fully agree.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium