Internationalised/Localised postal code and country elements

Gavin Brown <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.provreg
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Dear colleagues,

RFC 5733 puts the <contact:pc> and <contact:cc> elements inside the <contact:address> element, presumably so that they are grouped together with the other address elements.

However, this means that a contact could have two representations of its postal address - one with type="loc" and one with type="int" - which each have a different country and postcode. Since both of these fields consist solely of ASCII text (my research suggests that internationally, postal codes are solely alphanumeric), i cant see any benefit to allowing this, and I can conceive of a scenario where such a difference could cause operational or security problems (eg an abusive or malfunctioning domain appears to be registered in different territories, depending on the I18N preferences of a WHOIS client).

A "proper" fix would be to change the schema move the <contact:pc> and <contact:cc> elements into the <contact:postalInfo> element, but that would be rather disruptive as it would require a change to clients, so I thought it was worth raising this issue so that other server operators can decide whether to ensure that these fields are identical across both address types.

Regards,

-- 
Gavin Brown
Chief Technology Officer
CentralNic Ltd
Innovative Registry Services for ccTLD and gTLD registries
https://www.centralnic.com/

CentralNic Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales with company
number 4985780. Registered Offices: 35-39 Moorgate, London, EC2R 6AR.
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