Re: [idn] nameprep forbidden characters

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

At 12:17 PM +0800 9/16/00, James Seng wrote:
>Hence, I am more in favour with "disallow unless specify otherwise". (This is
>the third time i am hammering this at Paul :-)

As has been pointed out, the two methods will result in the same set. 
It is much easier to describe why certain characters are disallowed 
than to say why they are allowed. A future version of document will 
have the rules for disallowing, a list of disallowed characters, and 
a list of allowed characters. Implementors can pick whichever list 
they want.

>At 12:02 PM -0700 9/16/00, Dave Crocker wrote:
>>I think we have one big difficult problem at hand now. I not sure we are able
>>to handle the problems symbols like &, @, ' or even . is going to bring us.
>
>
>Please forgive this naive question that has already been handled: 
>Does this mean that Patrik Falstrom will not be able to represent 
>his middle name?  It has a colon (:) in it.

Correct: he will not, according to the way the group has moved so 
far. Given the wide deployment of protocols and applications that 
parse URIs, it would be pretty severe to come back and say "you can 
now expect to find a colon in the middle of the host name part of a 
URI". Of course, this group might change its mind on this and other 
characters that are special for URIs. For example, if we are open to 
colons, are we also open to slash (/) characters, which are probably 
more common in corporate names than colons are? Where do we draw the 
line?

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium