Adam M. Costello flip-flops: > In that case, IDNA section 3 requirement 1 *prohibits* dig from > outputing the non-ASCII form of domain names. So there's no problem,
The problem, of course, is that your so-called ``internationalized domain names'' are being presented to the user as gobbledygook. Let's try another example: the ``show'' program in the UNIX MH/NMH mail-handling system. Yes or no: Should this program convert domain names from your special-purpose 7-bit character set to the local character set? Again assume LANG=en_US.UTF-8, so this can be done. Your newly invented ``well-defined pre-existing output format'' criterion says that ``show'' is not allowed to convert. But this means that MH/NMH users, such as Keith Moore, will see gobbledygook instead of IDNs. How is Keith Moore supposed to see IDNs displayed properly in his email? Let's assume that he has the current version of X, with Unicode fonts and a UTF-8 xterm. Where exactly are your PunyCode IDNs converted to UTF-8? Which programs do the conversion? You keep dodging these questions because you know that any conversion will trigger interoperability failures. The output that you think is going to a user may actually be going to another program that does a domain-name lookup without knowing anything about IDNA. Kaboom. (To forestall any ``check for a tty'' weaseling: Programs such as Emacs and Expect will give you a tty anyway; and tools such as copy-and-paste are on the other side of xterm's tty.) ---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
