Subject: RE: [idn] Reality Check

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 18:25:53 -0700

--On Saturday, 14 July, 2001 02:43 -0700 Russ Rolfe
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> All thou I have been most of the time a silent observer, I
> agree here with Eric, and would to like to state the following:
> 
> 1. Since IDN is a new feature being added to the internet, most
> people    will accept the premise that to use a new feature,
> you will most    likely need to upgrade to some application or
> system that=20    supports the use of this feature.
> 
> 2. Before the Internet became the default carrier for E-mail,
> many    companies had some internal system that allowed
> electron mail.    With these E-mail packages people could send
> e-mail to some=20    people but not to all the people they
> wanted.  As the internet    became more accesses able to
> companies, people began to=20    request the ability to send to
>...

Russ,

It seems to me that your argument, with a very slight recasting
or none at all, would make at least as strong as case for one of
the major, "solve more of the problem" approaches -- search
systems and new DNS Class included-- than for embedding UTF-8 in
the existing, Class=IN DNS.  

To pick up on one part of your example, the companies that
managed to upgrade their mail systems to provide Internet gateway
capability did not put any of their existing uses at significant
risk, since the gateway should have been a clear add-on (this
was, of course, not the case with some software whose developers/
vendors took the upgrade process as an opportunity to introduce
other significant changes and a full complement of new bugs, but
that is a separate matter or should be).

Just an observation...

    john

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 12:36:12 +0900

At 18:25 01/07/14 -0700, John C Klensin wrote:

>systems

Yes indeed, except that we know quite well how to build and
run the DNS (including where we have to be careful,...),
whereas we don't really have any experience at all of how
to build an Internet-wide reference search system. It may
be that somebody comes up with some great idea tomorrow,
and such a system will fully exist in a year, but it also
may be that we never get there.

Another point is that search systems don't provide the same
as the DNS, namely lookup. There is no guarantee that you
get to the right place (or nowhere) directly. So 'solving more
of the problem' may cut off some of the problem space.

>and new DNS Class included-- than for embedding UTF-8 in

A new class is one of the many (unfortunately too many) options
to upgrade DNS to UTF-8, on one end of the spectrum, whereas
'just send UTF-8' is on the other end.

>risk,

Using UTF-8 is a clear add-on, isn't it? Where is the significant
risk? With 'just send UTF-8', there is the risk that a DNS server
blows up, or returns something else e.g. because it folds the most
significant bit in each byte to 0. But both of these behaviors
are clearly against the DNS specs. If a server blows up, it was
a risk 10 years ago already (if it existed then).
And 'any of their existing uses' is definitely NOT put at risk.
NONE of the UTF-8 proposals is putting at risk the resolution
of ASCII-only domain names.

Just a few observations,      Martin.