Subject: [idn] comments on IDNA-04

From: "James Seng/Personal" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 14:18:24 +0800

The ToASCII operation takes a sequence of Unicode code points and
transforms it into a sequence of code points in the ASCII range (0..7F).
The original sequence and the resulting sequence are equivalent host
labels.

The ToUnicode operation takes a sequence of Unicode code points and
returns a sequence of Unicode code points. If the input sequence is a
host label in ACE form, then the result is an equivalent host label
that is not in ACE form, otherwise the original sequence is returned
unaltered.

JS>> Suggest to define ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) before using it.
then s/ToASCII/ToACE/.

ToACE operation takes a sequence of Unicode code points and transform it
into an ACE.

ToUnicode operation takes an ACE and return a sequence of Unicode code
points.

---
ToASCII consists of the following steps:

    1. If all code points in the sequence are in the ASCII range (0..7F)
       then skip to step 3.

JS>> Step 1 seem to be optimization, but not a required step.

---
The ACE prefix, used in the conversion operations (section 4), will
be specified in a future revision of this document. It will be two
alphanumeric ASCII characters followed by two hyphen-minuses. It MUST
be recognized in a case-insensitive manner.

JS>> Suggest s/ACE prefix/ACE tag/. An "ACE tag" could be a uniquely
defined prefix and/or suffix defined by IANA and not neccessary in the
form of xx--.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 21 Nov 2001 10:35:01 +1100

> It is a mistake to standardized zone file format in the first place.

It's a textual interchange standard.   RFC 103[45] defined two
methods to interchange zone files.  This is a good thing as
it doesn't force you to run a DNS server in order to maintain
a zone file.

> What if I am using a DNS server which do not have a zonefile but it is
> stored in database?

You write a tool to load the database from the master file format
and dump to the master file format.  Nothing stops you using the
database directly.

> -James Seng
--
Mark Andrews, Internet Software Consortium
1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia
PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742                 INTERNET: [email-masked]