Hoops sorry: please read at the first one below : --- I came in here just to say two things as a "user" - the punycode thing seems OK but the DNS aspects are inadequate - the text you produced is not easily understandable. I was said to be a troll for the second point. May be could we also look at the (second) first one?
At 19:23 05/11/02, John C Klensin wrote:
--On Thursday, 31 October, 2002 23:40 +0100 Erik Nordmark
But, even in that case, we haven't permitted profile variations _within_ IDNA: a user, site, or registry cannot select a different stringprep profile, and that is a Good, probably necessary, thing.
"probably" necessary ??? At this date, this rises a lot of question. All I found was a very early commitment to that in the process. I did not read everythng yet. Any reason why it is "certainly" necessary? (a part from obvious non technical reasons) But much the same argument applies to the type of use Martin
contemplates. IDNA, as written, is _one_ protocol. It is not a toolkit for building other protocols, nor is it a a set of profiles that other protocols can adopt. Those two may be much the same thing in practice. As soon as we say "you should use that operation from IDNA, but without some particular step" we head down a slippery slope. That is especially true because IDNA contains (or appears to contain) a good deal of normative text outside the particular of, e.g., ToASCII. It is not clear whether "...explicitly state that one should apply ToASCII without the punycode step (and other steps..." includes some, all, or none of those textual specifications. And, whatever choice is made, "do just what is done over there, except..." is a poor way to do protocol specification and introduces some of the worst properties of profiling without any of the benefits of being explicit about what can, and cannot, be profiled.
You point is accepted. But to say that applying ToASCII to a valid ASCII name is equivalent to do nothing does not removes the need to use ToASCII, but helps understanding that this is what actually happens. The way it is written leaves many questions open. jfc
