IDN with Gemini?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 09:46:40AM -0500,
 John Cowan <cowan at ccil.org> wrote 
 a message of 93 lines which said:

> It seems clear from the behavior of web browsers that the Right Thing is to
> convert all IDNs to Punycode before putting them on the wire.

I disagree. This is not because HTTP does it that way that everyone
else should. IMHO, the right behaviour would be:

* parse the IRI and extract the domain name
* convert it to Punycode
* do the DNS lookup
* connect to the IP address and send the IRI as request

This leaves open interesting issues such as Unicode normalization but
it would be more natural for a new protocol, free of HTTP legacy.