Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ietf-idn-idna-08.txt

Dan Oscarsson wrote:

> 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?

The reason why this won't work is that there is no way to determine if the
remote end-point is compliant with the updated specification. If you want
to enforce an interpretation of the eight-bit range, you have to use new
RRs, a new class, an EDNS identifier, or something, in order to
distinguish between the legacy and modern systems. Otherwise, you send
UTF-8 to the remote system, it treats the data as MacRoman, and the
subsequent usages are working with invalid data. There must be an
identifier of some kind.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/