There is now a standard way to encode URIs containing arbitrary UNICODE
characters. This is described in RFC 3275 (which is currently a Draft
Standard), in Section 4.3.3.1, and in the corresponding W3C document and
has appeared in other W3C documents, for exampe XML Base.
Donald
On 30 Mar 2002, [ISO-8859-1] Claus Färber wrote:
Date: 30 Mar 2002 16:13:00 +0200
From: "[ISO-8859-1] Claus Färber" <claus(_at_)faerber(_dot_)muc(_dot_)de>
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: Moving Towards UTF8 vs ASCII(ACE) Forever
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> schrieb/wrote:
second, "ASCII for the rest of our lives" is a mischaracterization.
IDNA allows applications to accept and present IDNs in native
form, without requiring all applications and infrastructure to
upgrade before IDNs can be used. [...]
users don't care whether IDN queries are encoded on the wire.
This depends on your definition of "on the wire"; if you want to
IDNs to just work, you would have to put the ASCII version into
URIs, too. Users *do* care about URIs. If you put the UTF-8
version (%-escaped or maybe even unencoded according to a revision
of the URI specs) in the URI, they won't work with leagacy
software anyway (so ACE has no advantages).
Claus
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