Randy Bush writes: > so, it sounds like the problem is not the proposed standard in question, > but the lack of a transition plan without holes. shades of ipv6! No. IDNA is being proposed as something that new sites can use _right now_. In contrast, nobody is telling sites that they can rely on IPv6 for complete Internet service today. More importantly, IDNA is a set of changes without a long-term strategy. In contrast, specifying the desired final architecture is an explicit part of the IPv6 project; there are many documents along these lines, separate from the transition documents. There certainly isn't IDN WG consensus on IDNA as the long-term IDN solution. In fact, many of us suspect that there's consensus on the following statement, which implies that IDNA is merely temporary: The long-term IDN solution will encode Unicode characters as UTF-8 on the wire. The IDN WG chairs have repeatedly refused to run a straw poll on this statement, never mind actually settling all the other important details of what we're really trying to achieve! If we were faced with a document proposing IDNA as a long-term solution, I'd agree that the interoperability issues were only with the transition plan. It _is_ possible to make a world of multiple character encodings work correctly, even though it's remarkably bad software engineering. Of course, the lack of interoperability is only one of IDNA's problems. ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago