Updating RFC 5890-5893 (IDNA 2008) to Full Standard

[Paul Hoffman]

On Nov 16, 2012, at 6:09 AM, John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com> wrote:

> I don't want to drag this out, but even that change implies that
> we dismissed the "backward compatibility" issues as unimportant.
> That wasn't the case.  

I am someone who, often vocally, disagreed with the way IDNA2008 went with respect to backward compatibility. Having said that, I think Mark's characterization of the people who were promoting IDNA2008 as "people who did not feel that it was an important concern" is simply wrong. The long discussions about backward compatibility on the mailing list very much showed that the authors were concerned about it and were willing to incorporate changes for backward compatibility that had WG consensus (of which I was often on the wrong side).

We have IDNA2003 and IDNA2008 in deployment, both partially. We knew that this would happen, we talked about it, and we did IDNA2008 anyway. Name-calling at this point is not helpful to developers and end users of the two protocols.

--Paul Hoffman