UTF-8

[Nicolas Williams]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:00:33PM +0000, Shawn Steele wrote:
> ACE has "broken" almost everything here, even though ACE nominally
> shouldn't be a problem.  Those breaks are more ironic as most of those
> broken pieces already worked with Unicode.
> 
> For example, RFC 5280.  It had to be updated to support ACE, which was
> convenient, but now what do you do about the email local parts?
> There's no punycode for email, so the ACE workaround in RFC5280 is
> temporary at best.  It'll either have to:  A) allow UTF-8, B) Allow
> some special variant of punycode that works for email, or C) use or
> invent some other encoding.  So now everything that uses 5280 has to
> be updated twice :(

RFC3280 (which 5280 obsoletes) used IA5String from dNSName, which means
that UTF-8 couldn't have been relied upon to work in that field.

I understand your sentiment, but I don't think the problem is IDNA, nor
ACE.  I think the problem is that we didn't have Unicode and UTF-8 and
widely deployed in the early 1980s, or better, late 1970s.

Nico
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