looking up domain names with unassigned code points

[Martin Duerst]

At 09:39 08/05/13, John C Klensin wrote:

>So it is actually reasonable to infer that, if people start
>generating strings at random and building putative A-labels from
>them, most of the results will be invalid for one reason or
>another, independent of future version of Unicode.  If I were
>designing an application that was doing lookup, that, plus the
>display concerns, would almost certainly induce me to try to
>convert the string to U-label form and test it before trying to
>look it up.   I still don't think we should try to require that
>behavior, but...

Just to check: Are you saying that because with random strings,
the chance that lookup is successful (for reasonably long
strings) is rather low, you would convert to an U-label and
check to avoid unnecessary lookups.

Surely except for very special tests, the input to your application
wouldn't be random strings, or would they?

As an aside, are we expecting that applications will produce
different warnings for illegal (punicode) strings and for
failed lookups? My expectation would be that for applications
with a general audience (e.g. browsers,...), there should be
a generic message (something like "site not reachable, please:
- check spelling,...).

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp