Review of draft-ietf-idnabis-defs-10

[John C Klensin]

Paul,

I favor leaving the "bitstring" and "binary" categories in, not
because I like the pictures but because the distinction is
already made in the text of Defs (see the last paragraph of
Section 2.2), with references and for two other reasons:

	* This distinction has caused confusion in the past,
	even among the DNS-expert community.
	
	* Discussions have [re-]started about the direct use of
	UTF-8 in the DNS (i.e., without ACE encoding), partially
	because it has been done for some time outside the
	public DNS, partially because the ACE form (and special
	IDNA mappings) interfere with common APIs, and for other
	reasons.  See draft-iab-idn-encoding for one perspective
	one this. (Because that is an IAB draft, you can assume
	that I'm involved with it. You should not assume that I
	agree with it.)  If that discussion goes anywhere, the
	distinction becomes important because a binary label is
	one that contains octets with the high bit set and a
	bitstring one is another matter entirely. 

I do think it would be worthwhile to get a reference attached to
the figure that points to Section 2.2 and will figure out a way
to do that.

The figure has already been reformatted (in the working draft
for -Defs-11) to fit on one page. I'm applying your other
suggested changes to the document.


--On Sunday, August 23, 2009 10:08 -0700 Paul Hoffman
<phoffman at imc.org> wrote:

> At 11:52 AM -0400 8/23/09, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> I thought having the second figure helped to 
>> emphasize the scope of identifiers that DNS can support.
> 
> I remain unconvinced that this is explaining more than
> confusing. I would like to hear from others what they think
> the figure means.
>...