Re: [idn] Comparisons of the proposals

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

I have read both the UTF-5 and the cidnuc drafts, and that's why I posted
the query.

The cidnuc draft *does* say "domain parts that have no international
characters are not changed." One would assume that means the
cidnuc-transformed international domain names and current standard US-ASCII
domain names can co-exist in the same name server, in theory at least.

But the UTF-5 draft is silent on that issue. Ergo, my "stupid" question.

The answer is important because there's more than one way of looking at
"backwards compatibility." 

If all current zone files and host names in the world have to be converted
to cidnuc or utf-5, I'd say that's a backward comparability problem. That
problem, at least, does not exist with UTF-8.

Still curious....

Bill Semich
.NU Domain


At 01:39 PM 3/20/00 -0800, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>The shortest response would be "please read the drafts". :-)
>
>Here's an addition to the list that I gave the other day that will 
>hopefully answer your questions.
>
>Format of DNS requests and responses on the wire
>utf-5:  no protocol changes, names in UTF-5 (ASCII)
>cidnuc: no protocol changes, names in CIDNUC (ASCII)
>8&down: addition of IN bit in requests and responses
>         for internationalized names, names in
>         UTF-8 (binary)
>
>--Paul Hoffman, Director
>--Internet Mail Consortium
>
>
>
Bill Semich
President and Founder
.NU Domain Ltd
http://whats.nu
bill@mail.nic.nu