Subject: Re: [iucg] Punycode Mixed-case annotation

From: Marie-France Berny <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 22:21:02 +0200

Dear Wil,
May be time for you now to answer my June 26th mail? This might help to
better analyse your suggestions and all the comments of the day?

Marie-France Berny

2009/6/29 Marie-France Berny <[email-masked]>

> Dear William Tan,
> I am afraid I am quite confused by this burst of technical ping pong with
> Vint who wants mapping at protocol level.
>
> I just want to know how:
>
> - ecole.fra
> - école.fra
> - Ecole.fra
>
> These are three French orthotypographies of three different semantics which
> may relate to three different IP addresses. How do you propose to support
> them ?
> Thank you.
>
> Marie-France Berny
>

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2009 20:12:28 -0400

--On Monday, August 31, 2009 22:21 +0200 Marie-France Berny
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Dear Wil,
> May be time for you now to answer my June 26th mail? This
> might help to better analyse your suggestions and all the
> comments of the day?

I cannot speak for Wil, and won't try, but...

>...
>> These are three French orthotypographies of three different
>> semantics which may relate to three different IP addresses.
>> How do you propose to support them ?

The answer is "no".  The first and third of these are not IDNs
but are conventional, all-ASCII, host names.  For such names,
case-insensitive matching is done on the DNS server as part of
the basic domain name specification, which has been unchanged in
this area for nearly 26 years (and by the host table
specification, which predates it by nearly another decade).
They cannot identify different DNS tree nodes and hence cannot
identify different sets of IP addresses (or anything else).  

There is no way to change those fundamental DNS behaviors at
this point.  Even if there were, it would lie far outside the
scope of this WG.   As I have suggested several times before, it
you need to make those distinctions, you are going to need to
use an intermediate layer naming system, either resting on the
DNS (which is what I would recommend for several reasons) or
operating in its stead).  

But, for the basic functionality and distinctions, top asking:
you are about 35 years too late and are wasting your time and
ours.

    john