Re: [idn] Unicode tagging

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

> > the problem isn't what you do with them in DNS; the problem crops
> > up when either a human being or a computer program tries to copy them 
> > to email and finds that the email system either (a) (today) doesn't 
> > support non-ASCII email addresses or (eventually) (b) doesn't use the 
> > same encoding for non-ASCII email addresses.
> 
> I don't think we're in disagreement over point a.  I think most
> administrators will understand "It is possible to encode the LHS of an email
> address in the DNS but there's no point until the email system supports
> them".
> 
> I disagree with b though.  If the email system chooses a different base36
> style encoding then computers copying email addresses into DNS (to look up
> keys) need to understand both and use the appropriate encoding at a
> particular time.  Ordinary users should not see base36 encodings of anything
> (especially SOA records).  Administrators should understand the difference. 

if we reach consensus to use an ascii-compatible encoding for IDNs,
then a lot of these problems become a lot simpler to deal with.

but I did not think we had consensus on this.

Keith