Re: [idn] New protocol proposal: IDNRA

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2000, Keith Moore wrote:

| if the experience with RFC 2047 is any indication, it will be
| approximately 8-10 years before 75% of existing mail clients support
| display of IDNs, and much longer before mail clients can be expected
| to display IDNs properly - i.e. before a sender can reliably count on
| an IDN being displayed by a recipient's mail reader in "native" format
| as opposed to ASCII encoded form.
| 
| (even today, 9 years after the first MIME RFCs were released, mail
| clients cannot reliably be expected to decode MIME, and RFC 2047
| support lagged the rest of MIME)

  [I snipped Keith's 'on the other hand']

  While I don't have any strong evidence to contradict the pessimistic
rates of comformant adoption that Keith and John (and others) are
predicting, I have to wonder if things in the world of Internet computing
have changed (or are changing).  That is to say that the pessimistic view
is based largely on historical experience with SMTP, MIME, etc. and
perhaps some of the factors that created that set of problems aren't true,
or as true, for this area.

  I wonder if given some of the relatively newer pressures in the domain
of Internet technology adoption, namely increased commercialization (would
that be c15n? :-), an increasingly global focus. the i18n issues we've
been discussing, demands for higher levels of QoS, and very high quality
open source software, that a rollout of a multilingual DNS protocol might
be a less dismal prospect.

  I still continue to believe that, given the tremendous observed interia
in the deployed nameserver infrastructure, that any approach which
requires significant changes to that infrastructure is severely
challenged.  Client-side (particularly resolver-based) approaches seem
much more likely to succeed.

  -bws