In a message written on Fri, Jan 03, 2003 at 08:22:11PM +0100, Kandra Nygårds wrote:
IDN(A) is an effort to encode unicode into 7-bit DNS-labels, without breaking backward compatibility (too hard). While there originally were a few voices arguing for UTF-8 over the wire, they were few and the consensus today is that IDN(A) is a Good Way to Go(tm).
The problem here is that the working groups for different services are going different directions. E-mail base64 encodes Unicode in MIME. Usenet seems to be moving to UTF-8 directly. DNS is using IDN. Woe be the ISP who must provide all these services to their customers, and who's perl scripts must now be able to convert base64<->UTF-8<->IDN<->whatever else is out there just to be able to cobble together all the simple things we do everyday. Most (all?) RFC type standards today specify US-ASCII and/or ISO-8859-1 encoding. This is part of what has made the Internet so popular. I understand the need to support more characters, but let's do that by supporting some base encoding scheme and layering everything on top of that, rather than creating hundreds new encoding schemes, one for each higher level application. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org