Re: [idn] WG last call summary

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Randy Bush writes:
> so, it sounds like the problem is not the proposed standard in question,
> but the lack of a transition plan without holes.  shades of ipv6!

No.

IDNA is being proposed as something that new sites can use _right now_.
In contrast, nobody is telling sites that they can rely on IPv6 for
complete Internet service today.

More importantly, IDNA is a set of changes without a long-term strategy.
In contrast, specifying the desired final architecture is an explicit
part of the IPv6 project; there are many documents along these lines,
separate from the transition documents.

There certainly isn't IDN WG consensus on IDNA as the long-term IDN
solution. In fact, many of us suspect that there's consensus on the
following statement, which implies that IDNA is merely temporary:

   The long-term IDN solution will encode Unicode characters as UTF-8 on
   the wire.

The IDN WG chairs have repeatedly refused to run a straw poll on this
statement, never mind actually settling all the other important details
of what we're really trying to achieve!

If we were faced with a document proposing IDNA as a long-term solution,
I'd agree that the interoperability issues were only with the transition
plan. It _is_ possible to make a world of multiple character encodings
work correctly, even though it's remarkably bad software engineering.

Of course, the lack of interoperability is only one of IDNA's problems.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago