There is now a standard way to encode URIs containing arbitrary UNICODE characters. This is described in RFC 3275 (which is currently a Draft Standard), in Section 4.3.3.1, and in the corresponding W3C document and has appeared in other W3C documents, for exampe XML Base. Donald On 30 Mar 2002, [ISO-8859-1] Claus Färber wrote: > Date: 30 Mar 2002 16:13:00 +0200 > From: "[ISO-8859-1] Claus Färber" <claus@faerber.muc.de> > To: ietf@ietf.org > Subject: Re: Moving Towards UTF8 vs ASCII(ACE) Forever > > Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu> schrieb/wrote: > > second, "ASCII for the rest of our lives" is a mischaracterization. > > IDNA allows applications to accept and present IDNs in native > > form, without requiring all applications and infrastructure to > > upgrade before IDNs can be used. [...] > > users don't care whether IDN queries are encoded on the wire. > > This depends on your definition of "on the wire"; if you want to > IDNs to just work, you would have to put the ASCII version into > URIs, too. Users *do* care about URIs. If you put the UTF-8 > version (%-escaped or maybe even unencoded according to a revision > of the URI specs) in the URI, they won't work with leagacy > software anyway (so ACE has no advantages). > > Claus > -- > ------------------------ http://www.faerber.muc.de/ ------------------------ > OpenPGP: DSS 1024/639680F0 E7A8 AADB 6C8A 2450 67EA AF68 48A5 0E63 6396 80F0 > >