> > The transition issues for IDNA that actually pertain to Internet > > protocol behavior have been described repeatedly and are identical > > with the kind of changes that were required to adopt MIME. > > I can see why you'd want to say that, but it's a poor analogy. > > MIME imposed structure on unstructured data by using a subset of values, > and specifically limiting itself to particular technologies. I mean, even > RFC2047 only allowed some particular kinds of data (mostly unstructured) > to be extended, and marked structured data as off-limits. more precisely, RFC 2047 was intended only for human-readable text, because at the time we hadn't figured out how to solve the various problems associated with having multiple representations of machine-readable text. today we have a much better idea for how to do that. I agree with Dave that IDNA is very similar to things we did with MIME in both the header and the message body, and I think the experience with MIME will be a good predictor of experience with IDNA. Keith