draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi

John C Klensin klensin at jck.com
Sun Mar 8 01:35:12 CET 2009



--On Saturday, March 07, 2009 11:01 -0500 Lyman Chapin
<lyman at acm.org> wrote:

> Martin and Andrew,
> 
> Although it seems that numeric values above 255 would be safe,
> some   software looks only at the low-order 8 bits of a number
> encoded in a   16-bit (for example) field (ignoring any
> high-order bits) when it   "knows" that a numeric value will
> always be 255 or less. In that case   only the 8 low-order
> bits (10011010) of 666 (...01010011010) would be   recognized.
> Entering "666" into such an interface would be equivalent   to
> entering "154".

Lyman,

I'm completely confused and don't know what you are talking
about.  If the issue is domain names, expressed the preferred
syntax of dot-separated ASCII characters, "666" is as good as
"ABC" or "ACM".  If the issue is numeric values, the DNS spec
understand only octets and not, e.g., 16 (UTF-16?) or 32
(UTF-32/UCS-4) data fields.  The last I looked, it was quite
hard to fit a decimal number larger than 255 into an octet.

So, what are you saying?

    john



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