Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?

["James Seng/Personal" <James@Seng.cc>]

Dan,

> Can you please identify the systems, explain how they use domain names,
> and say what exactly you mean by ``crash-and-burn''? We need this
> information if we're going to accurately assess the cost of upgrading
> the world to support IDNs.

Yes, Software can be patch and Protocol can be redesign. The bigger issues
here is deployment and backward compatibility. Patching sendmail might be
trival for a good programmer like yourself. How fast do you think you can get
everyone to use your patch and would unpatch software fallback safely?

> Many systems use UTF-8 internally. It takes less work for them to read
> and write UTF-8 than for them to handle text in other character sets.
> Quite a few programs will Just Work(tm) if IDNs are defined as UTF-8,
> while they'll have to be upgraded if IDNs are defined any other way.

To be exact, most of localized software are based on local/native/legacy
encodings.

For those who uses Unicode/ISO10646 as the core, they tend to use wchar_t
internally which is either 16bit/32bit depending on platform.

_Some_ software use UTF-8 thru out but it is definately not a common feature
until recently.

> It's easy to imagine a world where 8859-1, JIS, KOI-8, and so on have
> all disappeared in favor of UTF-8. People are doing the UI work needed
> to get there; see, e.g., http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html.

Actually, I see resistant for people to drop their legacy encodings in favour
of UTF-8. And for those (clients) who do adopt Unicode (a lot of credit has to
go to Microsoft who provides a framework for Unicode in their SDK), it uses
32bit system. Software have to specifically convert wchar_t to UTF-8 char when
they want to use UTF-8.

> Don't you think it will be a bit embarrassing to look around in a UTF-8
> world and see that the Internet is using UTF-7?

For this, I totally agree with you. We also need to investigate a longer term
solution will bring us further beyond an ACE solution. You should probably
read the I-D draft-klesin-dns-role-00.txt.

On the issues jumping into a 8bit solution, take a look at RFC2825.

-James Seng