Re: [idn] additional comments from draft-ietf-idnra-00.txt

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

At 10.35 +0800 00-08-29, James Seng wrote:
>a) They dont think whole picture of IDNRA is complete.
>    They feel there is some hidden field in RACE proposal
>    or else why not use UTF-8 on the DNS query & response.

Because we don't want to have UTF-8 in names in application protcols 
which is not defined to use 8bit characters.

>b) If there is no functional difference between UTF-8 &
>    RACE, then in this case, there is no reason to waste
>    CPU time to convert UTF-8 to RACE.

There is a difference. RACE is 7bit only. UTF-8 is not. RACE can be 
used in all (application) protocols we have today, UTF-8 can not. If 
we go for UTF-8, _all_ application level protocols have to be 
redefined, and some of them (like HTTP) will be VERY hard to take 
care of.

A preliminary discussion with application area working group chairs 
said that "domainnames in protocols should stay at 7bit, or go to 
UTF-8" and further that "SMTP can be changed to handshake to UTF-8, 
if fallback encoding exists and is well-defined, but HTTP will not be 
fun due to the definition of URIs".

This is no official statement by any means, but one voice from a 
group of people with clue which happen to spend 20 minutes on the 
topic.

I expect as Area Director for Applications Area initiate more work in 
apps when the IDN wg have some proposal(s). I don't want people in 
Apps "guess" what to do. It is enough that IDN come with proposals.

>    Or alternatively, why not use at the RACE API level.

   paf