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Re: [idn] Re: 7 bits forever!

2002-04-04 08:16:01

If we are saying that the ACE <=> IDN(UTF8) so why is the two headers
not in sync?

because there are things which will know about the old headers and
change
those, without changing the new utf8 headers.

By the way, ACE != IDN(UTF8).

UTF-8 and ACE are two different ways of representing a Unicode String.

First of all, look at the above CAREFULLY ACE <=> IDN(UTF8) does not implies
ACE = IDN(UTF8) or ACE != IDN(UTF8), what I mean is they are interchangable,
and can be treat the same but not equal : )

The problem is not in the encoding (and with that I mean we can aswell be
conservative and use something (ACE) which works all over the place).
People seem to think that "if we use UTF-8 encoding, things are fine,
people will get nice display, we will not have copy-paste-leakage" etc
etc.

That is wrong.

I agree, the problem is not in the encoding, but if we treat ACE as an
encoding, so we should put it in other work group I guess, maybe we should
start a Encoding Unicode in Protocols WG : )
Display and "copy-paste" depends a lot on the applications if they support
it or not, so neither the use of UTF8 or ACE will solve this. But if
changing the protocol will make the DNS to work with UTF8 rather than
limiting ourselves to just LDH is a good thing, except we need to think of
ways how to make the transition smoother from ASCII world to the UTF8, I
think a lot of i18n applications face the same problem too...

The problem is the use of Unicode (or having multiple charsets). Try
matching two Unicode strings, and see how easy that is. If you manage to
get your brain around that problem, think about sorting and things like
paged-result-sets in LDAP. And if that is not enough, think about what
"network byte order" means in a situation where the local part of an email
address contain mixed reight-to-left and left-to-right text.

If you have a simple solution for that aswell which makes people happy,
let
me know.

So, I think this discussion should be about first of all the use of
Unicode
in an email address.

Secondly, we can talk about the encoding. But, the encoding is not the
problem.

Encoding is never the problem, but identifying the encoding is the problem,
so just like the encoding tagging in the other protocols, add encoding
tagging to DNS, or any required protocols that does not have it nowadays.



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