Dear RIPE: Please don't encourage phishing

Wed Feb 15 17:00:25 UTC 2012

On 2/15/12 8:32 AM, Mark Andrews wrote:
> ... Before deciding to go the IDNA route, treating DNS
> labels as UTF-8 was discussed, evaluated and rejected.

well, sort of. we started with "idn" as a wg label.

the smtp weenies opined that they'd never have a flag day and anything
other than a boot encoding in LDH would harm LDH limited mailers, so ...

the code point problem (or problems) was moved out of "infrastructure"
and into "applications", so the work product was labeled "idna", which
the successor wg had no alternative except to follow the "in a" set of
dependencies and assumptions.

as you observed, labels are length tagged binary blobs, and where the
blobs consist of 7 bit ascii values in the 'a'-'z' range, case folding
is performed in lookup.

what happens outside of that range is a path not taken, though i tried
in 2929 to leave that open for future work, the sentence which read
"text labels can, in fact, include any octet value including zero
octets but most current uses involve only [US-ASCII]." was, if memory
serves, proposed by a co-author to have been more restrictive.

i agree with the "rejected" statement, the "evaluated" and even the
"discussed" overstate the room available after the smtp weenies
weighed in on what was permissible in headers.

-e