[idn] IURL vs URL, IDNS name vs DNS name

["Larry Masinter" <LM@att.com>]

In draft-masinter-url-i18n-04.txt, we took the tack of defining a
_new_ protocol element, an "IURL" (Internationalized URL) which allowed
8-bit UTF8 sequences. We left "URL" alone, but noted that there might
be some situations, protocols and contexts that could be upgraded to
use IURLs instead of URLs. This got us out of the quandry of wanting
to upgrade technology but dealing with older software that couldn't
deal with the new representation.

A similar approach could work for "DNS names": define a new protocol
element (IDNS name), note that existing compliant DNS servers _could_
handle IDNS names as well as DNS names, and then allow some way
of encoding IDNS names in DNS names.

I would much prefer if the encoding of IDNS names in ASCII DNS names were
the same as the encoding of IURLs in URLs, and note that hex-encoding
of UTF8 has at least some implementation in the URL space and could
be used as the embedding mechanism for IDNS.

Larry
-- 
http://larry.masinter.net