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

[Solderpunk]

On Thu Dec 24, 2020 at 3:29 PM CET, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

> 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?)

Anybody could be forgiven for not inferring it from actually looking at
what gets posted to [spec], but the main reason there's a venue for
discussing spec finalisation at all is that there are still lots of
things to be done at the level of "crossing t's and dotting i's".  For
example, somebody recently reminded me off-list that the spec is still
silent on the question of whether or not servers need to use TLS's
close_notify mechanism once they're done sending a response, or whether
it's okay to simply close the TCP connection.  Or see also the fragment
related stuff that people have been posting about  Stuff like this, that
is to say small but important technical details and edge cases, is
actually what I consider the most important task of the [spec] topic.
This stuff ought to be finalised before a formal RFC-style specification
can be written up and potentially submitted to IETF.

The possible change to using IRIs is *by far* the most major change I
have considered making in probably a year.  I do not expect to ever
consider anything this large again, ever (meaning that the fear of
adopting IRIs being a slippery slope to more drastic changes in the
future is unfounded).  I'm taking my time on it because it's a major
change and because internationalisation is IMHO a very important issue,
but make no mistake -  I cannot *wait* for it to done so we can focus
on the smaller, hopefully much less contentious, details and get the
whole thing finalised.

I really consider Gemini 100% complete in terms of scope/capabilities.
People are doing wonderful things with it as is, it's basically
everything I ever dreamed of.  I am very ready to transition to spending
10 x more time and energy reading and writing Gemini content than
managing the protocol.

Cheers,
Solderpunk