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

[bie]

> This is, more and more, how I'm conceptualising things.
> Parsing/validating IRIs is not actually remotely difficult at all.
> Algorithmically it's an extremely minor change to parsing/validating
> URIs.  The apparent pain exists only because the world has apparently
> been very slow about packaging code up for this into major
> libraries/languages, probably because HTTP's ASCII-only nature reduces
> demand.  If we adopt IRIs, I would actually encourage Gemini software
> authors who find their language lacking tools for this not to write
> custom code for it that lives only in their software, but to actually
> try to get the functionality accepted upstream into standard libraries,
> or widely used third-party libraries.  This is generally useful
> functionality that's in no way Gemini-specific, and having easy support
> for it everywhere makes the world a better place regardless of whether
> Gemini thrives or declines.
> 
> I don't really think the alleged difficulty of handling IRIs is a good
> argument against accepting them.  I'm now more interested in
> learning/thinking about normalisation issues, which have been relatively
> under discussed so far.  It's possible this is where the real trouble
> lies.  Breaking a UTF-8 IRI up into (scheme, authority, path) is not a
> substantial hurdle.

This is enough of a decision for me, so I'm out. I'm not one to stand in
the way of "progress", however misguided, so I've taken down my 4 gemini
servers.

bie