[spec] IRIs, IDNs, and all that international jazz

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 10:36:43PM +0900,
 bie <bie at 202x.moe> wrote 
 a message of 46 lines which said:

> After thinking about this for a while, the biggest issue for me is
> that this is a breaking change. Breaking in the sense that it breaks
> *every single compliant server we already have*! If gemini, which
> has been surprisingly good at resisting breaking spec changes,
> accepts this, I don't see any reason to believe that it won't happen
> again and again,

As I explained in
<https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/004178.html>, I do
not think that backward compatibility should be a goal, since Gemini
is still experimental. Once the specification is "officially" "final",
this will be different. AFAIK, it is not the case (otherwise, what
would be the point of the [spec] topic?)

To answer your question: once the spec is "officially" adopted, it
makes sense to resist changes. We are not at this stage yet.

>  for equally silly reasons.

Internationalization is certainly not a silly reason.