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Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?
- To: "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>
- Subject: Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?
- From: "Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>
- Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 15:48:52 +0000 (GMT)
- cc: idn@ops.ietf.org
- Delivery-date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 07:55:45 -0800
- Envelope-to: idn-data@psg.com
On Sun, 24 Dec 2000, D. J. Bernstein wrote:
| idn-compare says that this ``doesn't work with many exiting [sic]
| protocols that relies [sic] on DNS.'' Which protocols? What exactly is
| so difficult about allowing UTF-8 in those protocols too?
|
| A few people on the mailing list have commented that particular pieces
| of software would need to be changed to handle UTF-8. So change them!
| The total number of lines of code is small. Nobody has come up with a
| proposal that would give users IDNs with less overall effort.
UTF-8 is an 8-bit, variable length encoding of UCS-2.
The various ACEs are (essentially) 7-bit encodings of UCS-2.
Using 8-bit data will break some applications.
Using 7-bit data (presumably) will not.
One objection that many people have to ACE-based solutions is the
'leakage' problem, where users wind up seeing ACE-encoded data in contexts
where they expect to see the name as they typed it. However, a
significant number of applications and OS localization environments do not
know how to deal with UTF-8 either, so this tradeoff is probably moot.
-bws