Three possible uses for IRIs

[bie]

>   I know Solderpunk wants to do a series of freezes then thaws as things are
> worked on, but I think things progress a bit faster than he can deal with,
> or wants to deal with, given his long absences on the list.

I'd love to see a spec freeze, too. There are already a lot of gemini
servers, clients and other tools out there and breaking changes should
be avoided unless absolutely necessary.

>   For me personally, I think this should be worked out, and I'm working
> towards that with my own server [1].  I've had to make changes to
> GLV-1.12556 in the past when the protocol changed, I can change it again.

How about waiting for a consensus to develop, *at the very least*?

If the protocol were to change to allow IRIs, that's a *major breaking* 
change that to me, as someone actually serving non-English content, is
not only completely unnecessary but harmful.

1. I would still have to percent-encode my links to stay compatible with
existing clients.
2. With clients now potentially sending IRIs and not encoded URIs as
requests I would have to change the request handling in my server code
to allow for this, possibly having to add third-party dependencies.
3. I'm still not convinced this would help anyone - IRIs still have
reserved characters that have to be properly encoded - so completely 
non-technical text/gemini authors will still have to rely on proper
tooling.

bie