RE: [idn] host name vs. domain name

["McDonald, Ira" <imcdonald@sharplabs.com>]

Hi,

NVT-ASCII is defined in RFC 854 / STD 8 - Telnet Protocol
Specification (1983).  It is a restricted subset of US-ASCII
(with a number of C0 control characters (0x00 to 0x1F) NOT
legal for use.

NVT-ASCII is also the charset of the (now obsolote for
formerly widely used) 'DisplayString' datatype in SNMP
MIBs.  It has 'leaked' into many other Internet application
protocols.

It is rather more than a 'goal' of the IETF to move away
from ASCII.  Per RFC 2277 'IETF Policy on Character Sets
and Languages' (BCP 18, January 1998), ALL Internet protocols
MUST support the use of UTF-8 in order to 'enter or remain
on the Internet standards track'.  Newly developed Internet
protocols MUST default to UTF-8 for text strings.  Existing
Internet protocols MUST be updated to support UTF-8.

The W3C has essentially the same stance (although UTF-16
without byte-ordering ambiguities has 'leaked' into W3C
Recommendations via the XML work).

Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (consulting architect at Sharp Labs America)
  High North Inc


-----Original Message-----
From: HIBBS, BARR (SBCSI) [mailto:RBHIBBS@msg.pacbell.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 16, 2000 12:48 PM
To: 'a.irvine@bfs.phone.com'
Cc: 'idn@ops.ietf.org'
Subject: RE: [idn] host name vs. domain name



> From: 	Aaron Irvine[SMTP:airvine@corp.phone.com]
> Reply To: 	a.irvine@bfs.phone.com
> 
> >
> > installations that do not gracefully support anything besides NVT-ASCII
> (and
> 
> A basic question: is NVT-ASCII just the same as US-ASCII?
> 
> 
> 
...pretty much....   NVT (or Network Virtual Terminal) ASCII is the
specified character encoding in most RFC's, although it is the goal of IETF
to move to a less restrictive encoding

--Barr