I do not know if the IDN mailing list is going to shutdown or if the IDN working group is going to move forward with new things?
Before that I would like to know if most of you want to have ASCII forever, or if you want to move to UCS as the character encoding to be used for interoperability? I have since the beginning of the IDN working group wanted UCS to the only character encoding to be used between systems. But from the discussions on the list I have felt there is a big group not wanting to leave ASCII. IDNA will result in increased complexity. I have written software handing the decoding of MIME and URLs. I very much dislike the mess where every small part of a text line have to first be parsed into parts, the each part have to be decoded using different methods. ACE, %-encoding, quoted-printable,... The world would have been so much simpler if everybody had used UCS. Why not at least make that the goal and try to get rid of the "encode on top of ASCII"? Looking at some of the more important areas: DNS, SMTP, HTTP and HTML they could be fixed fairely easy. - SMTP could add a negotiate in startup switching default character mode to UCS NFC in UTF-8 (requiring all headers to be UTF-8 and all default for all text). - HTTP version 1.2 could require all URLs and headers to be UCS NFC in UTF-8. - HTML 4.02 could require all URLs to use the same character set as the rest of the document or use %-encoded UTF-8. - DNS can use something built on UDNS, though due to having IDNA it will need an overhead as it will have to query the server if it can handle UCS (would not have been needed if we had started with UDNS). But it requires people willing to take a big step forward. I would very much like to help in defining the standards but so far I have felt there is too much "use ASCII forever". IDNA will not bring non-ASCII to my host names in the near future. It probably will bring it to my web browser, but it would have worked fine with UTF-8. And I already see all the failings where URLs end up being displayed %-encoded instead of using native characters. What does IETF want? I think it is high time for a major step forward in character set interoperability. Regards, Dan Oscarsson
