Subject: Re: [idn] IDNA in real life

From: Dan Oscarsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2002 14:04:55 +0100

Mats wrote:

>> As IDNA promotes the use of ACE, many vendors with little understanding
>> for the need of non-ASCII characters will just use ACE, I can expect
>> a long wait before applications handle native host names instead of ACE
>> unless you can force it on them by for example changing the resolver
>> library.
>
>I don't think that your assumption will come true. Next version of Windows
>NT (whatever it is called) will have a nameserver with support of the
>local character set.

Windows 2000 does allow host names with non-ASCII characters.
And it's DNS server uses UTF-8 based domain names following
RFC 1035.

So you are right in that Microsoft already support native host names
including native support in DNS (and that is following RFC 1035).
But not we get ACE names instead of native support and I expect
many other vendors will take a long time to move native as they
now can use ACE. 

   Dan

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From: Mats Dufberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 23:06:18 +0100 (CET)

> And it's DNS server uses UTF-8 based domain names following

It is hard to argue that UTF-8 follows the current standard for DNS and
domain names.

> many other vendors will take a long time to move native as they

I think that you underestimate the willingness of Microsoft of creating an
interface for their DNS server where the user can enter hostnames in the
local character set with automatic conversion to the ACE format in the
zone file.

I'll buy you a beer at appropriate IETF meeting if the first version of
Server Windows ("based on NT technology") released after published RFC's
on IDN will not allow you to enter native hostnames in local character
set!

Mats

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Mats Dufberg <[email-masked]>
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