Subject: skwan-utf8-dns (RE: (Almost final) Agenda for dnsind/dnssec in Oslo)

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 02 Jul 1999 23:55:19 +0200

At 19:50 28.06.99 -0700, Stuart Kwan wrote:
>Unfortunately, Levon Esibov and I will not be attending in Oslo.
>
>I have no suitable proxy to lead a discussion on UTF-8 DNS
>(ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-skwan-utf8-dns-02.txt) or on the
>GSS algorithm for TSIG
>(http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-skwan-gss-tsig-04.txt), so you
>may remove those from the schedule.  Both Levon and I would be happy to hear
>comments on the mailing list.

I would like to comment on draft-skwan-utf8-dns, but my comments may be
somewhat savage. And also out of sync, since on this remote island off
the north coast of Norway, I don't have a copy of version -02.

The most important problem I see is:
This document defines an input transformation (UTF-8 downcasing) on data
without defining which data this input transformation will be applied to.

The idea of "all textual data" seems logical, but exactly which record types
does that mean? The devil is in the details....
And - do we KNOW that no application ever depends on case data in a text 
record? URLs, for instance, are case sensitive.

The other problem is the idea that byte-wise comparision of downcased 
strings is sufficient for the comparision of UTF-8 encoded strings.
Much work is currently ongoing wrt Unicode normalization. Do we want to 
lock ourselves in now?

I've long wanted UTF-8 data in the DNS. And I think it's possible to Do 
Right. But I don't think -skwan-utf8-dns-01 is the Answer.
But -02 may be.

                        Harald A

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, Maxware, Norway
[email-masked]