"Dan Kohn" <dan(_at_)dankohn(_dot_)com> writes:
Our disagreement comes down to the definition we're each using for
"compatible". I would say that punycode is compatible with all MIME,
DNS, and Internet application protocols, because it is 7 bits, and so it
transits them unchanged. (In fact, it only uses LDH - letters, digit,
hyphens.) Now, it's true that the non-LDH characters encoded in
punycode look like gobbledygook on non-punycode-aware readers. But, the
punycode text is not going to be corrupted by gateways or non-punycode
aware user agents. User agents that understand it can provide good
i18n; the rest of the agents still work fine.
Of course, it depends on where one has the priorities.
If all one want to say is "look, here is a possibility for those
funny people who don't speak to English to have newsgroups in their
own language" and then roll over to other side and fall back to
sleep, something like Punycode perfectly meets the needs.
However, being one of those funny people myself, I am also interested
in a solution that works. And I don't see that Punycode does that. It is
fact so useless, that it's better to stay at the current situation.
For Punycode to be widely supported in newsreaders, there has to be
demand. And for there to be demand, there has to be newsgruops. And
for there to be newsgroups, there has to be sufficiently many potential
users that can understand the group name.
Note also that Punycode has the theoretical problem that the encoding
of a name could coincide with the name of an existing group. Not bloodly
likely, but it should bother die-hard standards buffs.
And though no news reader currently supports punycode, it's difficult to
imagine that it will not be ubiquitously deployed within a year or two,
Did people say the same when MIME was introduced? It was just recently
the popular news reader Free Agent got MIME support. And I am reading
this mainling list in a mailer in which I can read unencoded UTF-8
easily, but not Quoted Printable or Base-64.
By contrast, raw UTF-8 may work fine for some newsreaders (like
Mozilla), but it is *incompatible* for others, and especially for
gateways (like IMAP servers). Incompatible means that it breaks
software that had been correctly designed to work with previous versions
of the standard.
Note that, as in this case, elegance and compatibility are often at
odds.
Yes, and if one is interested in the elegance of the standards it is
an easy choice.
If one is interested in the stuff of actually being useful, then it is
not so easy. Then you may have to make a trade-off between compatibility
and usability.
--
Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar(_at_)algonet(_dot_)se