comments on defs -- definition of "IDN"

[Vint Cerf]

I thought we had explicitly tried to separate out LDH from the other  
forms so that Andrew's formulation actually makes more sense.

v

On Aug 9, 2009, at 2:17 PM, John C Klensin wrote:

> I've tried to reflect Andrew's 24 July comments in the latest
> version of "Defs", although possibly not quite as he expected,
> which will be posted later today.  There is one of them that
> represents a possibly-significant change which I cannot deal
> with without advice from the WG.  In particular:
>
> --On Friday, July 24, 2009 9:53 AM -0400 Andrew Sullivan
> <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:
>
>> 2.3.2.3
>>
>>   An "internationalized domain name" (IDN) is a domain name
>> that may    contain any mixture of NR-LDH-labels, A-labels, or
>> U-labels.
>>
>> This entails that www.example.com is an IDN: it contains three
>> NR-LDH-labels, which meets the "any mixture" rule, since one
>> possible mixture is "none".  That might be surprising to some
>> people.  What about
>>
>>   An "internationalized domain name" (IDN) is a domain name
>> that    contains at least one A-label or U-label, but that
>> otherwise may    contain any mixture of  NR-LDH-labels,
>> A-labels, or U-labels.
>
> The original version of IDNA took the position that the set of
> IDNs consisted of all labels that were valid under the LDH rule
> plus all labels that were acceptable to IDNA.  In other words,
> "IDN" was a superset of "fully-qualified domain name all of
> whose labels were in LDH form".  The current text in
> Definitions, cited above, is consistent with that historical
> definition.   I agree with Andrew that it is confusing, but
> suspect that a change at this point would result in even more
> confusion and possibly some errors.  So I haven't changed it,
> but am open to direction from the WG.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Idna-update mailing list
> Idna-update at alvestrand.no
> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/idna-update