Re: My thoughts so far

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 15:28 30-01-00 , Dan wrote:

>I hope this can be the start of really getting internationalisation
>into IETF and all its protocols. Not just domain names.

This list, however, is focused narrowly on DNS.  
In order to make good progress on IDNS requirements, 
we need to remain tightly focused, IMHO.

>The same should be done for other protocols like HTTP, NNTP, SMTP and FTP.
>For example all headers in HTTP or SMTP should allow UTF-8 and
>MIME-coded headers with quoted-printable should be deprecated.

Issues with protocols other than DNS need to be moved off of this
list and onto the respective lists relating to those protocols.  This list
needs to focus on DNS requirements.  In many cases, other protocols
either already support multi-lingual usage or are working on support
for multi-lingual usage.  Those other items are, however, out of scope
for this particular mailing list which is focused on DNS requirements.

>We need case insensitivity for more than the ascii subset!

Agreed.  Case insensitivity is an important property for all
character sets which have the concept of 'case'.

>But DNS must be able to represent both upper and lower case
>in its database and in the protocol. This is because case is
>important from some in presentation. An example is a lookup
>translating IP-numer to domain name. The domain name should
>have the original case entered into the database returned.

Disagree with the example.  If one agrees to case insensitivity,
one can't reasonably require the example above to work as
described above.

>The best handling of characters I can see so far is:
>- one character set must be used in the protocol.
>   It should be ISO 10646 (UCS) (all 31 bits).

ISO 10646 seems reasonable, though the particular
encoding for 10646 might be a thorny issue.

>- case insensitivity using a single well defined mapping.

A good goal, IMHO.

Regards,

Ran
rja@inet.org