At 12:04 AM 3/15/2002 +0000, Adam M. Costello wrote: >For a long time, domain names have in practice contained only ASCII >characters. There is bound to be software that breaks when fed >non-ASCII domain names. If a program outputs non-ASCII domain names >that are fed to unprepared software, things will break. If a program
In fact the elegence of IDNA is that it continues to pass around ascii characters to all but a very limited portion of the system. With respect to DNS, the only software that must deal with the extended character set(s) are: 1. The module that inputs the string to be stored, 2. The module that inputs the string to be looked up 3. The module that output a string Changes to #1 and #2 are only required when the input string is not ascii. Changes to #3 are required only if presentation in the extended character set are required. Failure to change #3 breaks nothing. Failure to change #1 or #2 does not break anything, though of course it limits the available character sets to the legacy ASCII-only world. As to non-DNS software that interface with DNS, note that making a change to any of the DNS modules requires that the programmer pay attention to the environment it is used in. Other than that, there are no breakage risks. d/ ---------- Dave Crocker <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com> tel +1.408.246.8253; fax +1.408.850.1850
