Some reading on IRIs and IDNs

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great colecmac at protonmail.com once stated:
> On Friday, December 11, 2020 4:58 AM, cage <cage-dev at twistfold.it> wrote:
> 
> > I agree! My only concerns is i have the impression that client that
> > will not supports IRI will be second class citizen in the gemini
> > space, and they will die slowly.
> >
> > So i think that IRI will be a de facto standard. :/
> 
> I do not think this will happen, and if it starts to happen I will
> fight against it. 

  There's a reason why UTF-8 was selected as the default character set for
text/gemini, and one of those is to allow other people than English speakers
a means of expressing themsevles [1].  I don't think it's entirely
unreasonable to expect such a person to use Unicode for both domain name and
filenames [2].  Yes, tooling could be made to handle "canonicalizing" links
[3] but why not look into allowing IRIs?  Without an attempt at it, it would
be difficult to know what would work, what doesn't and where the difficulty,
if any, lie.  *That's* why I'm so insistent on coding up
"proof-of-concepts".  Just decreeing "this is how it shall be done" rarely
works out well [4].  And decreeing "this shall NOT be done" could put off
non-technical, non-English speaking people. [5]

> I don't think the idea of "de facto standards" fits within the Gemini
> ethos at all. It's not supposed to be extensible and clients aren't
> supposed go off and do random things while others have to decide what to
> do and play catch-up. That is how the Web grew and became more complex,
> and it's why we have only a few browsers today.

  And this is working out if the specification should be ammended to allow
IRIs, and if not, at at least have a jutification.

> The ecosystem benefits when we all just stick to the standard, with the
> perhaps obvious exception of demos and toys.

  One more point of reference.  The Gopher RFC (RFC-1436) states the use of
ISO-8859-1 for a character set.  It is wrong then, for gopher servers to
serve up UTF-8 documents even though it's not standard?  Yes, gopher is not
Gemini, but UTF-8 does seem to be a modern "de facto standard" in
gopherspace.

  -spc

[1]	For example, gemini://blekksprut.net/

[2]	Otherwise, punycode wouldn't exist.

[3]	Conversion from IRI to URI, with Unicode normalization,  prior to
	publication.

[4]	Such as X.200---lovingly developed and standardized but no one used
	it.  Or Xanadu.  Over 60 years of design work and still not working.

[5]	And I'm saying this being a thoroughly American mut that speaks only
	English.