Re: [idn] compatibility chars in draft-ietf-idn-nameprep

[RJ Atkinson <rja@inet.org>]

At 09:20 16/08/00, Keith Moore wrote:
>>         So, for that reason, I think that while it is reasonable
>> to prohibit certain characters from use "on the wire", it is
>> unreasonable to prohibit all user interfaces from converting from
>> a prohibited character to an *fully equivalent* allowed character.
>
>perhaps.  but in such cases it's important that the protocol 
>(and API) used doesn't confuse the two.  If some layer translates
>a prohibited character into a permitted one, then the protocol
>and API need to provide the feedback to the application -
>here's what you typed, here's what I assumed you meant.

        While it might be reasonable to suggest this behaviour,
it is outside the IETF's scope to require this of an API
that *by its very definition* is NOT an IETF standard.

        Note that in my concept, the IDN protocol would only
accept/contain characters that were permitted and were already
normalised/canonicalised.

>That way it as at least possible to write applications which
>handle these things reasonably.
>
>(applications used to do this with domain names- if you typed in
>a name which mapped to a CNAME the app would then display the
>name indicated by the CNAME record) 

        Many modern applications do not do this.  While some
might consider this a bug, it is commonly not done today.

Ran
rja@inet.org