Punycode & IMA/EAI

[John C Klensin]

--On Thursday, 22 May, 2008 23:23 +0200 Frank Ellermann
<hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hm ?!?  You'll never see an URI with non-ASCII characters.
> That would be an IRI, and there are not many documents formats
> and UAs suporting such formats permitting IRIs yet.  But this
> will change when IDN TLDs and something in the direction of
> HTML 5 exist, and when IE6 is less popular than today, and
> when the EAI experiment turns out to work.  Just a matter of
> some years, or did I miss the point of your statement ? 

No, you got my point exactly.   The "I've never seen one of
those" statements are not helpful in either predicting future
use or figuring out how to proceed with this.  At best, they are
pure speculation about how people will behave when a different
and more diverse set of tools and options are available.

Given that situation, I believe that trying to use the protocol
definition to prohibit human behavior that is plausible and
harmless (such as putting an FQDN containing A-labels on a
business card) is unwise at best.  Worse, it would be a
prohibition that people would be fairly free to ignore,
especially since UI designers tend to pay attention to what
users think they want, at least in the absence of actual risk.

     john