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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: COM/NET informational message
From: "E.B. Dreger" <[email protected]> > BV> Before IDNA, some application developers had developed > BV> proprietary mechanisms designed to support IDNs. The Internet > > UTF-8 is a standard. MS products have used two-octet chars to > support Unicode for a long time. Any reason to add yet another > encoding? UTF-8 is a character encoding standard, not a DNS-standard. DNS is not, and has not ever been 8-bit clean, despite the fact that many, if not most, implementations will survive UTF-8 labels. IDN(A) is an effort to encode unicode into 7-bit DNS-labels, without breaking backward compatibility (too hard). While there originally were a few voices arguing for UTF-8 over the wire, they were few and the consensus today is that IDN(A) is a Good Way to Go(tm). > How about encouraging widespread adoption of EXISTING standards > instead of adding more cruft? UTF-8 is standard. Proper DNS > implementations are eight-bit safe. People upgraded browsers > due to SSL, Year 2000, Javascript... Or, how about encouringing widespread adoption of upcoming standards, such as IDN? http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/idn-charter.html Remember, DNS implementations may be 8-bit safe, but that doesn't prevent anything else from not being so. Domains are used in so much more than DNS, you know. =) Best regards, Kandra Nygards
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