My prod at IDN requirements

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

Hooray for the news! Time to get to work!
Here's a few thoughts about requirements.

Base requirements - I think we can regard these as given:

   DO NOT DAMAGE PRESENT DNS INTEROPERABILITY

Internationalization requirements:

   Allow internationalized characters to be represented and used in DNS names
   Allow internationalized characters to be represented and used in DNS records

   This is too broad - we don't know what that means.

Details of requirements - here's where reasonable people can disagree.
(for short I'm using "i18c" for "internationalized characters")
(apologies for any misuse/abuse of DNS terminology)

   i18c in a Query must be possible   YES/NO
   i18c in the name field of a RR Response must be possible YES/NO
   i18c in the content of a TXT record must be possible YES/NO
   i18c in a name field of a Response or in content of a RR must be 
uniquely
     identifiable as such YES/NO
   i18c must be returned as content of a CNAME YES/NO
   i18c must be returned as content of a PTR YES/NO
   i18c must be possible in dynamic update names & records YES/NO
   it must be possible to DNSSEC sign i18c records DNS server to client YES/NO

More in the solution space:

   iso 10646 characters will be enough forever for DNS purposes YES/NO
   a single representation for i18c must be chosen YES/NO

For matching records, Choose One:

   it matters whether matching is consistent across all servers
   it doesn't matter whether matching is consistent across all servers
   i18c Cyrillic A must compare equal to Latin A
   i18c Cyrillic A must compare not equal to Latin A
   i18c A with Ring Above must compare equal to a with ring above
   i18c A with Ring Above must compare not equal to a with ring above
   i18c ASCII A must compare equal to a
   i18c ASCII A must compare not equal to a
   i18c A + COMBINING RING ABOVE must compare equal to A with Ring Above
   i18c A + COMBINING RING ABOVE must not compare equal to A with Ring Above

Others are MUCH better than me in compiling example cases and requirements 
for Korean, Japanese, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew.....

SHOOT!

                 Harald A

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no