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Re: [idn] What's wrong with skwan-utf8?

At 16.44 -0800 00-12-24, Rick H Wesson wrote:
>There are also a lot of of protocols that
>expect name parts to be in 7bit ASCII, SMTP and SNMP come to mind, the
>latter being one that is often found in embedded systems running critical
>network infractstructure.

SMTP, SNMP, IMAP, POP, HTTP just to mention a few.

They can be updated of course (and I think that is your point). The 
Applications Area have created a small task-force(!) which is to 
review the protocols in question to see what can be done with them to 
see that they are internationalized. I.e. not only the domainname is 
to be internationalized but most certainly other protocol elements 
which are displayed to the user aswell. One example is the localpart 
in email addresses.

We have to differ between implementations and protocol specifications 
here. Many implementations of the above protocols happen to be able 
to handle UTF-8, while others can not. Regardless of this, the 
protocol spec have to be updated.

Also, there is a question whether UTF-8 is really what we should use. 
UTF-8 is not much more different than any ACE encoding because it is 
just yet another encoding of the 32 bit characters which is what many 
people feel we should start to use instead of the 7-bit which we use 
today. So, the transision is not from 7bit to 8bit, it is from 7bit 
to 32bit clean transport, and that is a completely different issue.

The problem with skwan-utf8 is that it doesn't talk enough about the 
implications on the application layer protocols which use domainname 
protocol elements. I.e. IDN is not a DNS problem. It is an 
application layer problem. DNS is already a binary transport, so if 
this was only DNS, we could say asap that we should send 32bit 
characters in the DNS protocol. DNS doesn't have to be changed.

    paf


-- 
Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>       Internet Engineering Task Force
Area Director, Applications Area                   http://www.ietf.org
Phone: (Stockholm) +46-8-4494212            (San Jose) +1-408-525-0940
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