COM/NET informational message

Fri Jan 3 19:22:11 UTC 2003

From: "E.B. Dreger" <eddy+public+spam at 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