Re: issue idnuri-02: New approach, new text

> These are reasons to change RFC 2396 in a way that allows %-escapes
> in the hostname component (and probably other components). Has this
> been considered and refused?

Yes, it has been considered and refused.  The IETF developed IDNA in
order to avoid the need for operating system infrastructure to be
updated en masse prior to deployment of i18n domains.  URI processors
are part of that infrastructure and the rationale for not changing them
is the same as that provided for not globally changing the 
implementations
of BIND.

IRIs have to be processed by applications that accept the burden of
full Unicode processing already.  URIs do not.  Adding punycode
interpretation to the processing of URIs or gethostbyname simply
will not happen because that technology is already deployed.  Thus,
in order to make deployment possible, punycode processing moves up
a layer and URIs are specified such that it becomes easier for the
IRI processor to determine where it is needed.

Schemes that use DNS within components other than authority will have
to provide their own percent-encoding-to-punycode processing, but that's
no big deal because there are no such schemes deployed that actually
use the domain name for DNS access (they simply use it for 
identification,
which does not require punycode).

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2003 17:47:22 UTC