Re: [idn] Unicode tagging

[Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>]

> We cannot ignore other parts that are affected by IDNs. In DNS there exist
> characters in labels and in text data. Some labels are host names.
> The same encoding should apply to all character data, otherwise
> it will be a mess to implement and get it right. 

be assured, it will be a mess no matter what we do.
the question is how to make that mess as small as possible.

but we need to look at how data are copied.  if someone takes an I18N'ed
email address from an SOA record and copies it into an RFC822 message
or an RFC 821 RCPT command, the result will be wrong, and the email
will not get delivered to the right place.  the way that IDNs are 
represented in email is likely to be different than the way that they 
are represented in DNS, because email has a different set of constraints 
to solve (and a *lot* more implementations that have to get updated 
and deployed before things will work)

> A host label must inside DNS be handled the same way as a SRV label. 

I agree that labels need to be encoded consistently.  however it 
might even be the case that some kinds of labels (not normally seen
by users) should remain pure ascii for now.  

Keith