John presented some very good points about not changing the prefix. There are more.<br><br>Suppose that we do change the prefix. The registries won't recognize that the A-Labels are the same, without bundling. What do clients do with <span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://%c3%96bb.at/" title="http://ÖBB.at" rel="nofollow">http://ÖBB.at</a>? Do they use the xn-- prefix? The new prefix? Make two DNS calls?<br>
<br>What about a series of communicating systems? If I convert to an A-Label (</span><a href="http://%c3%b6bb.at/" title="http://xn--bb-eka.at" rel="nofollow"><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-decoration: none;">http://xn--bb-eka.at</span></a>) with one of the prefixes and send on to you, should you always convert back to a U-Label, then convert to one or the other prefix? Or try both?<br>
<br>And as for incorporating native language in IDNs, I share John's misgivings -- and more, along the lines above. If I as a client see <span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://%c3%96bb.at/" title="http://ÖBB.at" rel="nofollow">http://ÖBB.at</a>, which languages do I convert to? The DNS servers are presumably not going to bundle them all together, so I have to pick among them. All possible languages (a huge list, once we also count script and regional variants)? </span><span style="font-style: normal;">All those that could h</span>ave umlauts? (So then <a href="http://xn--hagen-dazs-q5a.com">häagen-dazs.com</a> (an English name) wouldn't match.) And so on...<br>
<br>I think any serious look at changing prefixes would find that the problems form a big, nasty, hairball. The goal should be to interoperate between IDNA2003 and IDNA2008 as much as possible -- and avoid the need for a new prefix.<span style="font-style: normal;"><br>
<br clear="all"></span>Mark<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 10:56, Paul Hoffman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:phoffman@imc.org">phoffman@imc.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
At 11:32 PM -0500 2/25/09, Vint Cerf wrote:<br>
>Before we go down the path of introducing a collection of prefixes, I<br>
>think we have a lot to get done with the xn-- version first.<br>
<br>
At what point does this WG consider changing the prefix? We are currently discussing breaking the stability of names that any reasonable implementer of IDNA2003 would have expected under the current prefix. We are also discussing greatly reducing the expected interoperability in exchange for not having to do another revision later.<br>
<br>
Are these acceptable to do without changing the version identifier (which in this case is the prefix)?<br>
<br>
I do not want to change the prefix, but I also don't want to do things that would normally cause us to change it but then not change it anyhow. That kind of cheating has always led to bad protocols in the IETF; we can do better.<br>
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