Subject: Re: [idn] An experiment with UTF-8 domain names

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jan 2001 15:49:01 -0500

--On Sunday, 07 January, 2001 00:56 +0900 "Martin J. Duerst"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>...
> Yes. But how many such regular expressions do you expect
> for handling domain names? Can you give a reasonable
> example?

Martin, for better or worse, there has been a trend in many
organizations to reflect the flatness at the top level with
flatness in subdomains.   E.g., if the StupidAcme company had
departments for collections and customer abuse, their IT
department might set up a domain structure of 

   collections-hostA.StupidAcme.biz
   collections-hostB.StupidAcme.biz
   customer-abuse-hostA.StupidAcme.biz
   customer-abuse-hostD.StupidAcme.biz
rather than
   hostA.collections.StupidAcme.biz
   hostB.collections.StupidAcme.biz
   ...

And that situation leads precisely to wildcard searches on zone
files or copies of them.   Emacs is probably still the most
commonly-used tool for zone file editing and maintenance
worldwide.
   
This is arguably a really stupid way to use the DNS, but not one
that violates protocols or over which the IETF has any control.

   john

---

From: "Martin J. Duerst" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 07 Jan 2001 12:18:21 +0900

>files or copies of them.

Good example. Somebody in Sweden could just go on after
Z with additional letters, which would need two bytes
in UTF-8. But in most places, people will go to AA,
AB, AC,... after Z.

>Emacs is probably still the most

Nice. I just tested, and Emacs (newer version with the
multilingual stuff integrated) does handle such regular
expressions correctly (it doesn't use Unicode or UTF-8
inside, but that's not a problem, it can read and write
Unicode).

Regards,   Martin.