Subject: Re: [idn] UTF-8 as the long-term IDN solution

From: Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2001 14:43:16 -0400

At/À 20:19 2001-05-31 -0700, Eric A. Hall you wrote/vous écriviez:

...

> > and creating a new query format just for UTF-8 is certainly more
> > trouble than it's worth.
>
>No. The EDNS message is already defined and is required/used for things
>like A6 and DNAME already. This would just be another usage of that
>message. It also allows us to resolve the sizing problems.

fyi, there is a draft for idn over edns (draft-ietf-idn-idne-xx.txt) (ok, 
I'm one of the author)...

Marc.

>--
>Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
>Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/

---

From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 22:46:06 +0000

"Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Applications store/display names that they are given by DNS, so DNS
> must provide them with the data in the appropriate format.  Although
> the on-the-wire protocol can be ACE as you suggest, the resolver still
> needs a way to remember the desired disposition format of the query
> results.

Agreed.

> I suppose that it's technically feasible to ask resolvers to maintain
> state,

They already do.  gethostbyname() blocks and retransmits the query until
the response comes back or the time limit is exceeded.  That's quite
stateful.

> No.  The EDNS message is already defined and is required/used for
> things like A6 and DNAME already.  This would just be another usage of
> that message.  It also allows us to resolve the sizing problems.

Okay, creating a new query format just for UTF-8 would be more trouble
than it's worth, but it's not necessary, because the new format already
exists for other reasons, and we might as well specify that it uses
UTF-8.

Whether A6 and DNAME are useful enough to motivate wide deployment of
EDNS remains to be seen.

Marc Blanchet <[email-masked]> wrote:

> fyi, there is a draft for idn over edns (draft-ietf-idn-idne-xx.txt)

That looks good (after a cursory reading).

AMC

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From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 3 Jun 2001 00:02:30 -0000

Adam M. Costello writes:
> some existing applications will work to some extent by accident

You think that http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards.html#IDX20 is an
accident? You think that http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#mod
is an accident?

This is called modularity. The system is deliberately structured so that
the interpretation of bytes \200-\377 as characters is isolated inside
user-interface tools. Most code simply has to be 8-bit-clean.

---Dan