Re: [precis] I-D Action: draft-ietf-precis-7700bis-01.txt

[Erin Millard <[e-mail]>]

You're probably right. I was not referring to over-the-wire encoding, just
the preparation, enforcement, and comparison algorithms themselves.

The use-case I have in mind is just to give users some immediate feedback
about invalid characters in the browser, before any over-the-wire
transmission takes place.

On 5 September 2016 at 10:34, Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 9/4/16 5:30 PM, Erin Millard wrote:
>
>>     >>> * §2.2 Specifies that UTF-8 MUST be used as the encoding; do we
>> really
>>     >>> want to limit this to UTF-8 only? Is this for comparison purposes?
>>     >>> Then again, 99.99% of the time UTF-8 is what you should be using
>>     >>> anyways, so I'm not sure that it matters.
>>     >>
>>     >> UTF-8 is your friend, and everything in PRECIS is UTF-8.
>>     >
>>     > PRECIS is mostly encoding agnostic; implementations might favor a
>>     > specific encoding, but I don't think anything in the spec
>> specifically
>>     > *needs* UTF-8. That being said, there are so few reasons to use
>>     > anything other than UTF-8 that I don't think it really matters, it
>> was
>>     > just curious to me that some of the PRECIS related specs called out
>>     > UTF-8 and some didn't.
>>
>>     I thought they all did, but will double-check.
>>
>>
>> This actually became a bigger issue when attempting to implement PRECIS
>> prepare in JavaScript for the browser. JavaScript doesn't have native
>> UTF-8 support, so this meant the extra bloat of bringing in a UTF-8
>> library.
>>
>> It didn't make a lot of sense to me either, since all the encoding
>> affects is how you go from string to code points, and vice versa. It had
>> no effect on the rest of my implementation. I could absolutely be
>> missing something, but compared to how focused the rest of the spec is,
>> the UTF-8 requirement seemed like an afterthought.
>>
>> Can anyone explain which parts of PRECIS are actually predicated on the
>> original string being encoded in UTF-8?
>>
>
> Are we perhaps getting confused between the encoding that is sent over the
> wire and the encoding that is used within the processing application?
>
> In general, we in the IETF prefer to send UTF-8 over the wire. However,
> it's true that this is a matter for the "using protocol" (e.g., I
> distinctly recall an extremely long thread in the XMPP WG years ago about
> whether to support only UTF-8 or to give clients and servers the ability to
> also use UTF-16 - and "UTF-8 only" won that debate). Given that some
> protocols or other technologies that use PRECIS might use UTF-16 or give
> applications the ability to choose an encoding, you're probably right that
> it makes sense to relax the rule for PRECIS itself.
>
> I'll think about this some more and propose some text.
>
> Peter
>
>