Re: [idn] Comparisons of the proposals

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 06:17 PM 3/20/00 -0500, J. William Semich wrote:
>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.

Not only in theory, but in practice. Also, please not that it says domain 
name *parts*, not full domain names. Thus, the server for example.com might 
have a zone file that looks like:

www.example.com. IN A 208.100.100.40
aq8adspm3a.example.com. IN A 208.100.100.41

The second line decodes to äöl.example.com.

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

'Twasn't stupid. The draft is under-specified.

>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.

Zone files aren't part of the DNS protocol.

You don't need to change the zone files for current domains for any of the 
three proposals.

When it comes time to add äöl.example.com to the example.com zone file, you 
will be able to do it with any ASCII text editor for CIDNUC and UTF-5; 
you'll need an editor that can output UTF-8 for 8&down (or you'll need to 
enter the names in some other encoding into temporary files and then run 
the temporary files through a pre-processor program).

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium