>>master files are ASCII files. > >Maybe they are supposed to be. But what got my goat recently was trying >to parse a zone file that had UTF-8 in it. There are zone master files >that are not purely ASCII in the wild.
Indeed. I have no idea what they mean. Since the DNS is a mostly 8-bit clean protocol, give or take ASCII case folding, if I run into UTF-8 where I'm expecting a name, I can't tell whether the plan was to store those bytes literally as the names for some private application, or to treat them as u-labels and to put the corresponding a-labels into the names. It is my impression that there are places in Asia where they did 8-bit hacks before we came up with IDNA and some of those hacks aren't dead yet. Whoever created the zone files presumably knew which one they wanted, but if one of them shows up from, e.g., some random entity that's asked me to do name service, I can't tell what they mean without asking them. R's, John _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
