Comments on draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale-11

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Wed Aug 26 19:35:04 CEST 2009


Dear colleagues,

I have read draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale-11.  These are my comments.

This text in §1.1 bugs me:

   Traditionally, DNS labels are matched case-insensitively
   [RFC1034][RFC1035].  That convention was preserved in IDNA2003 by a
   case-folding operation that generally maps capital letters into
   lower-case ones.  However, if case rules are enforced from one
   language, another language sometimes loses the ability to treat two
   characters separately.  Case-sensitivity is treated slightly
   differently in IDNA2008.

It makes it sound as though there's just a kooky tradition in the DNS,
and we could fix that up.  But that's not true: the matching rules are
_defined_ to be case insensitive, so changing that would be a protocol
change to DNS.  Also, the text slides a little to easily between what
are different contexts of "label" here, and I think it could be a
source of confusion.  I suggest this instead:

   The DNS matching rules for DNS labels are case-insensitive
   [RFC1034][RFC1035].  That convention was preserved for
   internationalized labels in IDNA2003 by a
   case-folding operation that generally maps capital letters into
   lower-case ones.  However, if case rules are enforced from one
   language, another language sometimes loses the ability to treat two
   characters separately.  Case-sensitivity is treated slightly
   differently in IDNA2008.

In §8.2, the reference for DNSSEC should probably refer to DNSSECbis,
which is usually [RFC4033], [RFC4034], [RFC4035], since RFC2535 is
obsolete.  One can make a strong argument for also including NSEC3
[RFC5155], but I don't feel too strongly about that.

Here is where I make my now-familiar plea for the removal of the
following sentence, this time from §12:

   As is usual with IETF specifications, while the document represents
   rough consensus, it should not be assumed that all participants and
   contributors agree with all provisions.

Apart from these small changes, I support this document being sent to
the IESG.  I think it's ready.  I'll send some nits directly to the editor.

This completes my review of the IDNA2009 document set.  Thanks to the
editors for their hard work.

Best regards,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.


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