Subject: [Fwd: I-D ACTION:draft-hall-dns-datatypes-00.txt]

From: "Eric A. Hall" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 17:25:41 -0500

I'd like to bring this up for discussion please.

There are a handful of problems that this draft tries to address. The
original problem which motivated this effort is that there isn't an easy
way for a dual-mode (STD13 & IDN) name server to determine whether or not
a particular eight-bit name is a binary name or an i18n name. If you read
through draft-hall-dm-idns-00.txt (expired but around), you see this
problem pretty clearly. The state machine falls apart when these names
show up. The best way to solve the problem is to impose strong data-type
rules on the underlying data such that there is no way for an A RR (for
example) to have an eight-bit codepoint value in the STD13 namespace.

Secondarily, the UCS character repertoire contains logical characters with
a variety of encoded representation forms. There is no logical character
for "octet value 0xHH" so there is no way to represent eight-bit octet
values in the internationalized namespace. Well, we could hack something
up with an extension or variation of \ddd but there are other secondary
problems from that approach, and the best solution here (again) is to
define strong data-type rules.

Setting aside those two problems above, there is a general need to define
strong data-types for the different domain names types and their
associated RRs so that application protocols know what to do. There has
been rampant confusion on what is valid for which purposes, and a big part
of this draft attempts to clarify the confusing points.

Along the same lines, this draft attempts to repair holes and conflicts in
the specifications. It consolidates minimum length of a domain name to 1
character (conflicting data between 952 and 1035), maximum length of a
hostname and domain name to 255 octets (forcing /etc/hosts to match),
defines formal usage for the dot separator and requires longhand forms to
accomodate its presence, extends the \nnn syntax to data-streams other
than zone table storage, and so forth. If nothing else, this work should
be done, even if the rest of it is malarky IYHO.

Please read it and give your thoughts.

BTW, half of the document is schema, references and general overhead, so
it's not as large as it appears.

Thanks

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/
>From - Wed Jul 03 17:02:02 2002
To: IETF-Announce: ;
From: [email-masked]
Reply-to: [email-masked]
Subject: I-D ACTION:draft-hall-dns-datatypes-00.txt
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 06:28:39 -0400
Sender: [email-masked]

--NextPart

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title		: Domain Name Data-Types
	Author(s)	: E. Hall
	Filename	: draft-hall-dns-datatypes-00.txt
	Pages		: 39
	Date		: 02-Jul-02
	
This document defines syntax and structural rules for a namespace 
of internationalized domain names, and also clarifies the syntax 
and structural rules for the existing DNS namespace. Furthermore, 
this document defines syntax and structural rules for specific 
types of labels and domain names, and also defines usage rules for 
specific resource records within the domain name system. This 
document specifically does not describe any mechanisms for 
interacting with these namespaces, domain names or resource 
records, but instead focuses exclusively on the syntax and 
structural rules.

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