Adam: Well, I hope I did not cause too much of a feud! Actually I followed closely the first year of activity in the group, so at least I had a starting point. Some of the comments I made tried to be from the side of the casual implementor.
[Sect. 4.1., para 4.] IMHO, adding the sentence "ToASCII fails if any step of it fails" is enough to clarify the algorithm. > > Sect 3, req. 2). "An equivalent domain name". It is a *unique* > > equivalent domain name, right? > > Not necessarily. Punycode and ToASCII don't say whether uppercase > or lowercase ASCII letters will be used in ACE labels. oops... I forgot that mixed case may happen. You are quite right, of course. I only wanted to point out (again, since the concept is stated elsewhere) that up to upper/lowercase the conversion is unique. > By the way, an editing error in this paragraph was fixed > between idna-08 > and idna-09. I just found it in the site for the group. Was it already officially issued? [ACE labels] > We make one general recommendation regarding user interfaces: > try not to > show ACE to users unless they ask for it. I don't think it's > our place > to get into the specifics of how the user asks or how the ACE > is shown. Ok, I think I understand it. My concerns were on the line of "if a Unicode character may not be displayed, it could be useful to show the original string so that the user could notice the difference", but you are right: it is an application issue and it does not belong here. > > Sect. 8. Why EDNS has not been included in the specifications? > > The whole point of IDNA is that it doesn't depend on any changes to > the infrastructure, neither the DNS infrastructure nor any other > infrastructure (like mail relays and web caches). The STD-13 DNS > service is entirely sufficient for IDNA; EDNS is not needed. Of course it is not *needed*, but I was thinking at something a bit different. EDNS could have been shown as an *example* of a possible solution to the lengthening of labels, without any endorsing. > > As a side issue, I'd like to be pointed at some heuristic > data about > > Punycode. > > I compared Punycode (back when it was called AMC-ACE-Z) against some > other algorithms: > > http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~amc/idn/ace-eval.gz got it, thanks. Thank you again, .mau.
