Subject: RE: [idn] IDN's with any ASCII character

From: "Jarrod Hollingworth" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 15:22:08 +1000

> For example, let's say that I want to register the domain name
> "this&that.com" or "100^10.com".

And another example the micro (u) symbol - ? or other high ASCII
characters??

Jarrod

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:21:05 -0700

Jarrod Hollingworth <jarrod at backslash dot com dot au> wrote:

> And another example the micro (u) symbol - µ or other high ASCII
> characters??

There's no such thing as "high ASCII."  ASCII only goes up to 0x7F.
Everything else is Latin-1 or Unicode or GB 18030 or something else, but
it can't be called ASCII.

U+00B5 MICRO SIGN would seem to be legal in an IDNA label, although not
necessarily easy for everyone to type.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/

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From: "Adam M. Costello" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 06:48:17 +0000

Doug Ewell <[email-masked]> wrote:

> U+00B5 MICRO SIGN would seem to be legal in an IDNA label

Yes, it is.  Although if you convert the label to ASCII and back again,
this code point will become U+03BC (Greek small letter mu) because of
the NFKC step in Nameprep.

Also note that just because a name is syntactically valid, that
doesn't mean a registry is under any obligation to let anyone register
it.  It is expected that most registries will be cautious and limit
registrations to subsets of Unicode that they are confident they
understand well enough to manage properly.

AMC

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From: "Jarrod Hollingworth" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:25:16 +1000

Thanks Adam and Doug, this has cleared things up.

Regards,

Jarrod Hollingworth

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 08:20:38 -0400

--On Tuesday, 29 April, 2003 23:21 -0700 Doug Ewell 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> There's no such thing as "high ASCII."  ASCII only goes up to
> 0x7F. Everything else is Latin-1 or Unicode or GB 18030 or
> something else, but it can't be called ASCII.

Doug, just in the interest of being precise about this, my 
recollection is that the first US version of "Latin-1" (aka ISO 
8859-1) was formally known as "8 bit ASCII".  The current 
version of "ASCII" -- ANSI/INCITS 4-1986 (formerly X3.4) is 
titled "Information Systems - Coded Character Sets - 7-Bit 
American National Standard Code for Information Interchange 
(7-Bit ASCII)"
The parenthetical note is an artifact of that "... Coded 
Character Sets - 8-Bit American National... document which, if I 
recall, was withdrawn when the US adopted/endorsed ISO 8859-1 
rather than maintaining its own version.

The ANSI (and INCITS) rules about references to withdrawn 
standards are a bit muddy, but to characterize such a reference 
with "can't be called" is excessive.  While, as far as I know, 
"high ASCII" has never been a standard term, "ASCII-8" and 
"8-Bit ASCII" definitely have been.  And both terms are still 
used informally, both inside and outside the US, to refer to the 
Standardized form of Latin-1, i.e., ISO 8859-1.

      john