[54475] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: COM/NET informational message
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (=?iso-8859-1?Q?Kandra_Nyg=E5rds?=)
Fri Jan 3 14:23:35 2003
From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Kandra_Nyg=E5rds?= <kandra@foxette.net>
To: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 20:22:11 +0100
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
From: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam@noc.everquick.net>
> BV> Before IDNA, some application developers had developed
> BV> proprietary mechanisms designed to support IDNs. The Internet
>
> UTF-8 is a standard. MS products have used two-octet chars to
> support Unicode for a long time. Any reason to add yet another
> encoding?
UTF-8 is a character encoding standard, not a DNS-standard. DNS is not, and
has not ever been 8-bit clean, despite the fact that many, if not most,
implementations will survive UTF-8 labels.
IDN(A) is an effort to encode unicode into 7-bit DNS-labels, without
breaking backward compatibility (too hard). While there originally were a
few voices arguing for UTF-8 over the wire, they were few and the consensus
today is that IDN(A) is a Good Way to Go(tm).
> How about encouraging widespread adoption of EXISTING standards
> instead of adding more cruft? UTF-8 is standard. Proper DNS
> implementations are eight-bit safe. People upgraded browsers
> due to SSL, Year 2000, Javascript...
Or, how about encouringing widespread adoption of upcoming standards, such
as IDN?
http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/idn-charter.html
Remember, DNS implementations may be 8-bit safe, but that doesn't prevent
anything else from not being so. Domains are used in so much more than DNS,
you know. =)
Best regards,
Kandra Nygards
