> The question is really why 8/16/32 bit Unicode is better than 5bit (ACE)?
ACE and UTF-8 are just compression algorithms that squeeze larger Unicode characters. ACE is more efficient than UTF, although more complex. But the claim to fame that UTF-8 has is that it is a standard that idn can reference, and it is coming into widespread use elsewhere. So moving to UTF-8 long term seems like such an obvious choice is surprises me that it even gets debated. Of course, Punycode is a nice compression method... Maybe we should take it to the Unicode forum and suggest that it be the next version of UTF-8? But if that doesn't happen, it should logically be phased out. Bruce
