Re: [idn] iDNS.net

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

On Tue, 5 Dec 2000, Suzanne Topping wrote:

| Also, are there any predictions for which of the many proposals will
| probably be selected as the standard? Is evaluation close enough to
| give an indication? I've done a lot of reading through many ietf
| documents without being able to come to a conclusion on this.

  Suzanne, the upcoming IETF meeting in San Diego next week should prove
pivotal in clarifying the technical direction of the IDN working group
with respect to the resolution of internationalized domain names. 

  Until then I think it would not be productive to speculate too heavily.

  Basically there are two sets of choices that we need to make in terms of
IDN:

  - What encoding to use for the names.  The two basic choices are some
flavor of ACE or UTF-8.  I think the consensus of the wg is, at this
point, that Unicode is the best direction to go in terms of a character
set encoding.  I've seen other proposals, and Unicode has its own set of
issues, but that seems to be the most reasonable, and technically mature
choice.  An ACE likely implies no changes to the protocol, UTF-8 would.

  - Where to do IDN.  There are a number of choices here, constrained
partially on what you choose above.  In an ACE-based approach, you can do
IDN transformation in the resolver (in my opinion the best place to do
it), in a proxy-agent, by modifying the resolving nameserver, or perhaps
by modifying the authoritative nameservers.

  I would expect to see a substantial amount of activity on the IDN WG
mailing list following next week's meetings.

  -brian