Dave - What is your guess as to how quickly servers will be
upgraded, as compared to how quickly applications will be
upgraded?
My idea is that servers would be upgraded quite quickly,
much more quickly than applications.
The number of DNS server software offerings is not that
large, and the people responsible for the software are
in one way or another following this WG.
Any serious isp would very quickly get requests to upgrade
the DNS servers they advertise in their DHCP, and would
upgrade. (maybe with the exception of some isp in the US
outback)
Local resolver software can also be upgraded easily,
because it's a single upgrade for a system, and because
most probably patches will be provided rather quickly by
the OS vendors or by third parties.
Of course DNS servers that authoritatively serve IDNs
can be assumed to be upgraded also.
For applications, it's much more difficult. In some cases,
you will be lucky, but in other cases, you won't. If you
depend on an application, you may have to wait forever.
Also, application upgrades may cost much more.
So upgrading the DNS side isn't that much on the critical
path as far as I can see.
Regards, Martin.
At 00:06 01/07/19 -0700, Dave Crocker wrote:
>The premise behind transition approaches that use special encoding, on top
>of an existing infrastructure that is unmodified, is that arbitrary pairs
>of participants can safely use the scheme, without waiting for
>infrastructure changes. The comparison, then, is against a scheme that
>requires deeper changes, to the infrastructure.
>
>In this case, the question is about changes to the DNS server
>infrastructure. UTF8 requires changes to them. ACE does not.
>
>Hence ACE can become usable far quicker than a raw binary approach.
>
>This of course does not mean that ACE will work for everyone immediately.
>But, then, neither scheme will cause me to be able to type or read kanji.
>
>On the other hand, if I DID understand kanji, then someone with a domain
>name that uses that character set would be accessible to me, subject only
>to my upgrading my own system. Neither they nor I would have to wait for
>DNS server infrastructure upgrades.
>
>With UTF-8, we would have to wait on the server operators to make the upgrade.
