Re: [idn] additional comments from draft-ietf-idnra-00.txt

[Dan Oscarsson <Dan.Oscarsson@trab.se>]

>At 10.35 +0800 00-08-29, James Seng wrote:
>>a) They dont think whole picture of IDNRA is complete.
>>    They feel there is some hidden field in RACE proposal
>>    or else why not use UTF-8 on the DNS query & response.
>
>Because we don't want to have UTF-8 in names in application protcols 
>which is not defined to use 8bit characters.

But we want all protocols to go 8bit! (and most are).

>
>>b) If there is no functional difference between UTF-8 &
>>    RACE, then in this case, there is no reason to waste
>>    CPU time to convert UTF-8 to RACE.
>
>There is a difference. RACE is 7bit only. UTF-8 is not. RACE can be 
>used in all (application) protocols we have today, UTF-8 can not. If 
>we go for UTF-8, _all_ application level protocols have to be 
>redefined, and some of them (like HTTP) will be VERY hard to take 
>care of.

HTTP is 8bit!!!!

>
>A preliminary discussion with application area working group chairs 
>said that "domainnames in protocols should stay at 7bit, or go to 
>UTF-8" and further that "SMTP can be changed to handshake to UTF-8, 
>if fallback encoding exists and is well-defined, but HTTP will not be 
>fun due to the definition of URIs".

Yes, SMTP can be fixed easily.
HTTP is already 8bit. There is no problem to use UTF-8 in URIs.
Except for the stubborn group who think an URI can only be ASCII.
I have used 8-bits in URLs for many years.

It is really high time that the ASCII only people let go of their idea
that ASCII is everything. Most protocols can use 8 bits, most can
easily use UTF-8 (which is not that efficient but we have it for the
ASCII people. If will not help me who require ISO 8859-1 compatibility).

We cannot go on using ASCII forever just because some do not want to
fix the old protocols.
SMTP works over 8-bit channels. The protocol can easily be fixed with
downgrading to ASCII.
HTTP is 8 bits. There is no problem to allow all headers to be UTF-8
and URLs to be UTF-8 (without any %-encodings).
You just have to accept that the world is not just ASCII.

DNS is a protocol that can use all 8 bits and have since the beginning
allowed 8 bits in domain names. Lets not put an ASCII layer on top
of the binary just to avoid having to fix some software that currently
only handles ASCII.

Lets have an open mind. Think UCS! Think non-ASCII.

   Dan