Fwd: RFC 3490 on Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)

Of interest:

>To: [email protected]
>Cc: [email protected]
>From: [email protected]
>Subject: [rfc-dist] RFC 3490 on Internationalizing Domain Names in 
>Applications (IDNA)
>
>A new Request for Comments is now available in online RFC libraries.
>
>         RFC 3490
>        Title:      Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)
>[...]  URL:        ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3490.txt
>
>Until now, there has been no standard method for domain names to use 
>characters outside the ASCII repertoire.  This document defines 
>internationalized domain names (IDNs) and a mechanism called 
>Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) for handling them 
>in a standard fashion.  IDNs use characters drawn from a large repertoire 
>(Unicode), but IDNA allows the non-ASCII characters to be represented 
>using only the ASCII characters already allowed in so-called host names 
>today.  This backward-compatible representation is required in existing 
>protocols like DNS, so that IDNs can be introduced with no changes to the 
>existing infrastructure.  IDNA is only meant for processing domain names, 
>not free text. [...]

--
Sean M. Burke  [email protected]  http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/