- From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>
- Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:47:00 -0400
- To: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
- cc: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>, Eric Brunner-Williams <wampum@maine.rr.com>, discuss@apps.ietf.org, brunner@nic-naa.net
... > and you've been in the IDN discussion so you should also be familiar > with those issues. The IDN discussion has produced a requirements memo that states, inter alia, that The intended scope of this document is to explore requirements for the internationalization of domain names ... This isn't header processing, and it isn't 8-bit clean processing, and the use of "internationalization" here differs fundamentally from industry and academic i18n usages. In the same statement of scope, the requirements memo even constains a recommendation, viz, It is recommended that solutions not necessarily be within the DNS itself, but could be a layer interjected between the application and the DNS. This is somewhat unique to the IDN WG's Requirements Draft editors, a recommendation in lieu of a, and before, a requirement. It is within reason that Apps area ADs, former and current, could want to solve a problem which could be stated as infrastructural, or as application specific, in the latter form. It is within reason that the application-specific problem statement is not the unique means to identify the mechanism or set of mechanisms which form a solvable problem. The majority of the IDN poll participants have expressed some form of interest in an application solution for extending the set of 63 (only 37 unique) values available for composing dns labels. These all involve encoding a larger set of values on the unchanged (though tagged) set of 63 (or 37) values, and some heuristics about the larger set of values. There are the predicable distractions when someone mentions "language" or "script" or "search" or "friendly" or ... but these are distractions, the only dns issue is the label space, 4-bits-plus-5, or greater. That doesn't make the proposal correct or best or anything but one with some interest (mine included, but not in an exhaustive "ACE ONLY" context). It does suggest that the discourse on the issue could be improved by moving the WG into the Apps Area, since its co-chairs, requirements editors, and more popular proposals favor application-specific mechanisms. In a nutshell, the discussion of 8-bit transparency, in SMTP, or in any other part of the problem space, in the IDN list, has been a little less than professional. This isn't about Eric's time or Keith's, availability or valuation. Cheers, Eric
Received on Thursday, 28 June 2001 12:48:33 UTC