Date: Fri, 13 Aug 1999 18:39:12 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: glenn@ircache.net (Glenn Chisholm) Cc: ragnar@sysabend.org, louie@TransSys.COM, yurtesen@ispro.net.tr, billf@jade.chc-chimes.com, mannsber@starmedia.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: (2) hey Message-ID: <199908131839.LAA21529@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9908131110020.280-100000@abalaea.ircache.net> from "Glenn Chisholm" at Aug 13, 99 11:17:20 am
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> > So everyone is supposed to lower their standards to accomodate idiots? I > > don't think so. > > I think that you missed my point. My point was that when the Internet is > populated with a group of people who were involved with the standards > maintenance of high standards is easy. They are extreamly unlikely to > violate their own standards. However once there are a number of people who > have little or no idea what the actual standards are some degree of > enforcement will be required. This discussion is irrelevant. The DNS and iDNS working groups of the IETF have already discussed the use of binary characters in domain names. RFC 1036 has been clarified. The reason for the restricted alphabet is legacy applications; the DNS itself is capable of handling binary data. The only remaining issue is one of character set unification; the general consensus is 16 bit Unicode, with an 0xFFFE prefix to indicate Unicode 16 bit tuples will follow (network byte order); the sole dissentor is Matsataka Ohta, which is expected, since the Japanese hate Unicode for not having started with JIS 208 so that they could use the ordinal value of their characters for collation (a natural result of Chinese dictionary order being able to classify Japanese characters, but Japanese order being unable to classify Chinese characters). Forget the fact that there is no longer a valid central hosts.txt file, or that it is named /etc/hosts on most machines. It seems natural (to me) that /etc/hosts will become a Unicode content file, to match the iDNS. For legacy applications that specify a restricted alphabet (e.g. RFC 822 and RFC 821 -- SMTP based email), see the draft on UTF-5, which can be applied at the resolver level for legacy applications. If you wish to participate in the discussion, you need to subscribe to namedroppers (the DNS working group mailing list) or the iDNS working group mailing list (idns-list@idns.org). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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