Localization issues: (WAS alpha v0.2)

[Olafur Gudmundsson <ogud@tislabs.com>]

James brings up some real good issues in this message these are among the 
most important issues that we need to resolve. Some of these are not issues
we want to open discussion on thus they should be taken care off in
the requirements document.

>
>1. localization needs. for example, some queries raised on the issues of
>   doing <COUNTRY>.<2LD>.<DOMAIN>.<HOST> in the reverse way. Make more sense
>   for some languages and country convention. 
>   (Oh boy, this is going to get flame!)

No need to flame. 
Presentation issue: DNS expresses domain names on the wire in the 
least significant to most significant order. Any application can accept and
display labels in different order or show only some of the labels. 
Suggesting changing significance of label order is dead on arrival in
the context of DNS. 

>
>
>2. localization needs again. Does double-width period counted as a domain
>   delimitator like a single-width period? On a similar notes, this is
>   related to double-width Alphanumeric vs single-width alphanumeric.

DNS presentation issue again: Domain names on the wire are represented as
<length><string><length><string><0> 
where length is 1..63  
where string is [USASCII] or BINARY depending on who you talk to. 

Each language/implementation CAN make up it's own rules about separators. 
Historically "." has been the separator of labels in domain names. 
Using the same separator everywhere is a real good idea but that will not
stop people from creating new separators. 

>
>
>3. localization need once more. How to handle right->left writing order
>   such as Arabic. One consideration is treat this as an non-issue because,
>   for example, MS Windows CP1256 which defines Arabic actually encodes
>   the domain name in the correct byte order as per norm from left->right
>   but the render reverse it. On the other hand, this may not apply on
>   some other system such as Mac or Unix.


This is a real good question: we do not want to create a system where there
are two possible orders, the language aware and the language ignorant
implementation come up with different names. 
The my gut feeling is force wire format to be left to right in all cases, 
but I'm willing to listen to arguments for and against this. 

How this is done in different operating systems is not relevant to this 
discussion. 

	Olafur
 
--------
Olafur Gudmundsson - NAI Labs 			(443)-259-2389 
The Security Research Division of Network Associates, Inc.
ogud@tislabs.com  Olafur_Gudmundsson@nai.com  Private: ogud@acm.org