RFC5895 and UTS46 ?

J-F C. Morfin jfc at morfin.org
Tue Oct 26 21:55:11 CEST 2010


Seems to be a very good analysis.
- UTS45 : backwards compatibility
- RFC 5895: going foreward and suitable for use in new kind of applications
- our IUser investigation: both and more, through permitted new 
architectural perspectives.
jfc

At 03:01 26/10/2010, John C Klensin wrote:
>FWIW, if "officially" means "normative parts of the Standard",
>yes.  And yes.
>
>I would suggest that they are philosophically somewhat different
>in addition to being "two ways of doing the same thing".  At the
>risk of getting myself in trouble and with the understanding
>that I had very little to do with the development of either
>document, 5895 is a specification of a mapping model going
>forward and suitable for use in new kinds of applications as
>well as older ones.  UTS46 is more concerned with backwards
>compatibility and comes down squarely on one side of an old
>philosophical argument in  the IETF (and standards development
>processes more generally).  In the case of IDNA, that argument
>can be seen as being about whether, how, and how long one should
>try to support, or make concessions to, a practice the community
>has decided is undesirable despite the observations that it
>occurs in the wild and that some people are dependent on it.
>
>Someone who believes that the practice, even if it violates the
>earlier standards or associated guidelines, has to be supported
>forever, would take one position on that.  Others might be
>inclined to say that an undesirable practice is an undesirable
>practice and that it is in the interest of the community to stop
>such practices as quickly and unambiguously as possible, even by
>making things that used to work suddenly stop working.   Most
>sensible people find positions somewhere in between those
>extremes, but there are lots of positions in between the
>extremes and hence lots of room for disagreement about what
>should be done.
>
>      john
>
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