Subject: Re: [idn] WG last call summary

From: Robert Elz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 2002 23:37:21 +0700

Date:        Sat, 16 Mar 2002 05:54:58 -0800
    From:        Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
    Message-ID:  <[email-masked]>

  | The DNS does not have searching.

The sad thing about this whole debate is that the DNS has nothing
to do with it at all.

It is touted as "international domain names", which would make you
think that the DNS was deeply involved, but it really isn't.

Aside from the A==a rule in the DNS, it cares nothing at all about
characters or their meanings.

All the work here is for the benefit of other protocols, the DNS (which
never had a problem with domain names in any char set whatever) is being
mangled to make life easier for other protocols that really should have
been fixed years ago.

So, what the DNS has, or doesn't have, is irrelevant - what is important
is what all the protocols that are the users of domain names (every one of
them) has, or doesn't have.

kre

ps: this whole discussion is silly anyway - there's too much potential
profit
to be made selling domain names in non ascii based countries for anyone to
care much about doing things the right way - all that matters is that
something
be done immediately, so that profit potential can be realised.

---

From: "D. J. Bernstein" <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Mar 2002 06:47:20 -0000

Robert Elz writes:
> All the work here is for the benefit of other protocols, the DNS
> (which never had a problem with domain names in any char set whatever)
> is being mangled to make life easier for other protocols that really
> should have been fixed years ago.

Exactly.

The IDNA documents claim, in attempting to justify IDNA's archaic 7-bit
character encoding, that 8-bit names would break DNS servers. There is
not a shred of evidence for that claim. See the message from the BIND
company to the IDN mailing list dated Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:39:29 +1100.

The real problems are the 8-bit bugs in some HTTP clients, some SMTP
clients, and Sendmail. See http://pi.cr.yp.to. DNS is not the issue.

Of course, IDNA demands an upgrade from every client in the world,
including clients that already work fine with UTF-8: the MacOS X version
of Internet Explorer 5.1, for example, and many UNIX programs running
under the UTF-8 xterm. Even worse, we're going to have to go through
_another_ massive upgrade for mailbox names and for every other
internationalization target.

How much pain is the IETF willing to inflict upon the universe before
admitting that 7-bit software is obsolete? Is it really so hard to
understand how much the users will benefit from settling on UTF-8?

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago