[idn] Re: Document Status?

[Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net>]

Mostly the problem with this thread is that people are trying to debate 
concepts and principles, but they are failing to provide any detailed 
scenarios that cause problems.


At 04:53 AM 9/4/2002 +0200, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Dave Crocker <dhc@dcrocker.net> writes:
> If I press the PRINT button on an IDNA in my mail reader, it is
> important that people are able to put it back into the original IDNA
If you are printing it, you are not "putting it back" anywhere, so i have 
no idea what you mean.

In any event, as noted, user interfaces deal with multiple data types just 
fine.  There is nothing about an DNA that makes it particularly distinctive 
from other, labeled, structured data types that UIs already deal with.

But mostly this line of discussion continues to fail to distinguish between 
over-the-wire encoding, versus encodings within the host.  After 30 years 
of networking protocols, it would be nice for people to keep this 
distinction clear.


> IDNA will be used to identify entities.  If there is any confusion as
> to which identity a certain IDNA really points at, there will be
> security consequences.
IDNA strings are unique domain name strings.  They are unambiguous 
identifies.  Nothing that has been presented here alters that simple 
fact.  Hence there is no way of guessing what "confusion" you are referring to.

And, by the way, it has nothing to do with the encoding trick that makes 
IDNA similar to MIME content-transfer-encoding.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker <mailto:dave@tribalwise.com>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850