On Mar 18, Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > Hmm.. so you're saying that *ALL* that code out there that double-checked that > things that claimed (possibly implicitly) to be USASCII were in fact in the > 0-127 range are "crusty" code? No. I'm saying that if a piece of software gets input that is unexpectedly 'out of range' and then crashes and burns it is badly written. Sure, checking data is a good thing. Not checking it and letting things 'just break' is stupid. There are 14-year olds in high school in their second class of visual basic programming who know this. To go back to the original argument, trying to put a stop on a standard getting through because it breaks a piece of softwre written some time ago that a small percentage of people use today is a dumb idea. OK, let's take IDNA. How many people are there in China that would benefit from this process? Let's say the population is 2 billion, and it would benefit 5%. That's 100 million people. How many people would be 'hurt' by the example given breaking? Are there 100 million people out there who would be affected? If yes, then the process needs to stop and take that into account. To argue that it's upsetting the existing user base is also flawed - this is not about keeping things cosy for ourselves at a cost to those outside of the Latin alphabet. If somebody can show how this process will break things for the majority of users (in other words using IE 4 and above, with Outlook Express for mail), THEN it would be a good idea to question interoperability. I'm not saying that we should be considering IE and Outlook Express as de facto standards, just as a benchmark to how many people are likely to experience 'breakages' as a result of IDNA things being pushed through. > What's wrong with this picture? There's too much blue in it, and its skewed to the left a little. :-) -- Paul Robinson