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Re: RFC 2047 and gatewaying

2003-01-03 20:35:22


I wanted to jump in here for a moment to draw a few things together.

Recently on Nanog (information and archives at
http://www.nanog.org/mailinglist.html) there was an announcement
about NSI moving forward with "international" domain names, eg a
hack to DNS to allow non US-ASCII (or maybe non ISO-8859-1)
characters.

After reading the thread on here, and the information on the NSI
proposal I must admit I am alarmed.  After doing some more research
it appears the problem of non US-ASCII character sets is appearing
across the board, which is no surprise.  Being only a US-ASCII
speaker, the problem is of little concern to me, but the proposed
solutions I have seen so far are of great concern.

While I know little of Usenet's problems, or of NSI's motivations,
I can speak as a sysadmin who has found simple harmony to the fact
that all the internet protocols use US-ASCII, or ISO-8859-1.  I
also see a future developing where if I want to code up a perl
script to do something I'll have to understand UTF-8 to read a
Netnews article, some weirdo NSI encoding to DNS resolve names from
that article, and then know how to base64 encode things for e-mail.
And that's just for three services I have been following.

This is already bad, but knowing that OS vendors are dealing with
the UTF-7/UTF-8/UTF-16 problem, and other protocol groups are
dealing with the same issues (indeed, IMAP uses UTF-7) seems to
show a very fragmented future.

I have no idea who's right or wrong, but I do know that if every
protocol/service decides on a protocol/service specific method of
encoding non US-ASCII characters that we're going to make a monumental
step backwards.  I also understand that the Internet is probably
too large today for a "flag day" to UTF-8 (or UTF-7, those are
probably the only two options network wide).

What's my point?  Today I can "grep" a newsgroup article (ok,
depends on server software and format), pass that to "dig" (ok,
maybe with some sed and other work) and find out DNS information,
and then use "sendmail" (ok, with a wrapper to generate a real
e-mail) to mail someone.  I hope we all agree this is a good thing.
I see a future developing where a custom filter will be needed
between each of those steps to preserve "international" characters.
I hope we can all see why that is bad.

If you should take anything from this e-mail, it's that I would
support an IETF group to develop a meta-standard for how we migrate
from US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1 to Unicode, done in such a way that
all protocols and services can use a similar, and most importantly
compatable scheme.  This starts at the OS (layer 3.5ish?) and moves
all the way up to the application.  Having new protocols/services
deployed with "proprietary" solutions is, in my opinion, a step
backwards.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell(_at_)ufp(_dot_)org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request(_at_)tmbg(_dot_)org, www.tmbg.org

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