IDNA was made to allow non-ASCII in host names by making only applications understand them. And I have seen that some are experimenting on adding this to web browsers.
But is this were it is needed? The basic need of ACE is to allow ancient programs to still being able to get a name in ASCII only. But a web browser is a new program, it is easy to modify and it could use UTF-8 directely. On the other hand, the programs that ACE is there to protect, like for example a lot of system software under Unix, many of them are programs that really need to be fixed to handle non-ASCII. Before I can tell my Unix host that its name contains non-ASCII and have programs like inetd, logging, telnet and ftp handle them, ACE have less need as browsers work fine with UTF-8. Note: the programs above handle non-ASCII names when I can enter the names into the programs and configuration files using non-ASCII characters. The names may not be in ACE. Native encoding is required. So maybe the easiest thing to do is to rewrite the resolver libraries to decode/encode UTF-8 or ACE into native character set so that all programs never see ACE or UTF-8? I am very doubtfull that ACE in application only, will allow me to use non-ASCII in my host names soon, as it will not fix many of the programs that most need to be fixed. Maybe after 10 years. Dan
