Re: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Dan Kohn writes:
> standardizing true UTF-8 support for DNS (probably using EDNS)

You don't know what you're talking about. The DNS protocol is already
8-bit clean. DNS servers and caches can already handle 8-bit data.

> it's a huge amount of implementation work for no meaningful gain (since
> IDNA code paths will still have to be supported forever)

If IDNA were a complete solution, if the massive costs of implementing
and deploying that solution had already been incurred, and if Internet
software development came to a complete halt so that we didn't have to
worry about costs imposed on future implementors, then I'd agree.

But IDNA isn't a complete solution; only a tiny fraction of the IDNA 
costs have been incurred; and, most importantly, Internet development
shows no signs of coming to a halt.

All the short-term upgrade costs that we're considering, no matter how
huge they might seem, are tiny compared to the long-term costs of the
character-set mess. Do you want implementors in ten years, or twenty
years, or fifty years, to be continuing to worry about conversions from
one character encoding to another? I want them to be spending the same
time providing _new_ features for the users.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago