All right, IE and others do support UTF8 - UTF 8 good, ISO 8859 bad. But that is HTTP (and, partially HTML). UTF-8 encoding in browsers, as I understand, refers to the content encoding, and not URL (URI) encoding, which is discussed in another RFC. Or we could mention several other standards, like RFC 821 which is about SMTP, which explicitly defines that an e-mail address (thus, a domain name too) can _not_ include unicode characters. (And that includes utf-8, too, since a valid e-mail address is a very thin subset of even the standard ASCII characters). RACE is nothing more but a conversion to make utf-8 ASCII compatible - more precisely, it makes a unicode domain name to be representable without breaking the domain name syntax. There is nothing wrong with RACE, IMHO. The problem lies elsewhere.i stand to be corrected here - my understanding of events in the idn world is fuzzy.a standard already exist which is supported by a number of software developers including IE. thats utf-8 - those interested should find the rfc at the ietf archives.
but verisign for some odd reason went with their own standard which required plug in support.
See above.
now i remember reading a notice from verisign on nanog which detailed some
weird proxy majik with the dns and port 80.
That sounds like some sort of a nonsense :-)
all queries to the tldI say forget plugins. For a while, there will (?) be plugins - after that, IDN support will (?) make its way into all browsers. I use Mozilla, and get the update every month. I don't give a sh*t if M$ users will need plugins! :-) They are used to service packs anyway :-))
servers carrying their idn's will be answered by a proxy server which will
then look up the respective domain name and proxy the session. i always
say if it looks like a duck and quacks like one - then we most likely have
a duck and the egg laying is next.
this whole proxy service to make idn work without a plug in defeats the
general purposes of the dns. and introduces another point of failure -
i.e. the verisign proxy.
so i assume there's some hope. i wonder if anyone has tried to register a
utf-8 name in the dns maybe a cctld to test and see if it would work with
a browser without any plug in. would be fun to know the results.
- Cs.
