Re: [idn] prefix/suffixes in internet-draft

[Frank Ernens <fgernens@enternet.com.au>]

Marc Blanchet wrote:

> - idn ace prefix for me is like a protocol number: a registry should assign
> it, not the protocol author. Currently, IANA is taking that role for
> protocol numbers. I don't know which organisation should do the assignment,
> but certainly not the wg, not the author.

If it is done well enough the prefixes, and the competing encoding
schemes, will become de facto permanent and all software will have
to support all of them. And later some large outfit may invent
its own prefix and widely deploy it without registering it, hindering
interoperability. For comparison, both these problems have occurred
with the charset registry (the [accidentally, I believe] unregistered
charset being "Windows-1252").

I thought the situation before, in which a prefix separated IDN names
from others but collisions between competing IDN schemes could occur,
was ideal. It ensured that at completion of testing all the test
names had to be converted to a single scheme.

> But, this would be for testbed purposes inside their own domain name space.

Yes, genuine testing shouldn't need prefixes.