Re: [idn] Internationalized PTR draft submitted

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Rick H Wesson wrote:

| please explain why having a tag for a hostname's PTR record, when it
| is already encoded in a charset that encompance's *all* languages, is
| benifitial.

  I think I see what this draft is getting at, although I'm not sure that
its a good idea.  The intent here (as I read it) is to ensure that the
response received from the DNS can be interpreted in the user's native
language and script.  This seems to be coming from the particular point of
view of speakers of the CJK languages (see the examples in the draft),
where a reasonably similar word or phrase can be be represented in very
divergent scripts and Unicode ranges.  The idea then would be to be able
to receive a response appropriate for (essentially) your 'locale'.

  I can see the logic here:  when I do the forward query I'm starting with
a name that I want in a language and character set I (presumably) know.  
When I do the reverse query I want to specify what language and character
set I get the answer back in (or at least be able to have the resolver or
application do something with the data based on my preferences...this
issue isn't addressed in the draft).  Actually I don't think the issue
here is character set...the data will be in UTF-8, just different data
depending on the user's preferences.

   My initial reaction was basically: 'Is this a problem that really needs
solving?' PTR lookups are not performed by the vast majority of
user-facing applications, and the only time that I can think of this data
even being exposed in any application scenario is the case where some
services (ftp, http) will complain or deny access to a resource if the A
and PTR data do not match (which I think is stupid, but that's another
discussion :-)  This seems like a lot of protocol and implementation work
to solve a problem that will only be experienced by a particularly small
group of users (mostly sysadmins).

  I can see other, existing mechanisms that could solve or minimize the
perceived problem that underlies this draft, which is 'how do I obtain
meaningful (to me) information about a given IP address?'.  While the DNS
is one place to look, the various routing/AS information registries can
also be used to support this.

  -bws