Adam M. Costello wrote:
>> IDNA must NOT restrict current usage and DNS standards making it >> impossible to update the DNS standard later with a suitable defined >> handling of non-ASCII octet values! > >The door is left open for updates to DNS: > > If a signaling system which makes negotiation possible between old > and new DNS clients and servers is standardized in the future, the > encoding of the query in the DNS protocol itself can be changed from > ACE to something else, such as UTF-8. > >What we don't want to allow is untagged non-ASCII text in DNS messages, >because there is no standard for what it means or how it should be >compared. It is simple to standardise it. We just publish a short RFC defining how octet values with the 8th bit should be handled. There are already DNS servers supporting names in UTF-8 and other encodings. Why not standardise what encoding should be used? > >> IDNA is not an update of the DNS standard. > >IDNA is mainly orthogonal to the DNS standard, but it could be >considered an update in one small respect. RFCs 1034 and 1035 say: > > domain name comparisons for all present domain functions are done in > a case-insensitive manner, assuming an ASCII character set, and a > high order zero bit. > > Name servers and resolvers must compare labels in a case-insensitive > manner (i.e., A=a), assuming ASCII with zero parity. Yes ASCII characters must have zero parity! This is because DNS uses 8 bit octets, not 7bit ASCII. > >It seems pretty clear that the 8th bit is reserved for future use. >As far as I know, no use for the 8th bit has ever been standardized. Then it is high time it was standardised. Let's standardise it to be UTF-8 as that is highly compatible with current usage. >IDNA effectively says that the 8th bit is not to be used for >internationalization, at least not for the time being. It's still >available for other purposes (like non-textual domain names). That is bad, the 8th bit is already used for internationalisation! Dan
