comments on last call drafts

["Martin J. Dürst"]

On 2009/10/26 7:35, John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Tuesday, October 13, 2009 14:41 -0400 Dan Winship
> <dan.winship at gmail.com>  wrote:

>>    * 4.4 Punycode Conversion:
>>
>>          The failure conditions identified in the Punycode
>> encoding         procedure cannot occur if the input is a
>> U-label as determined         by the steps above.
>>
>>      But "the steps above" require running the Punycode encoding
>>      procedure on the putative U-label to determine its length
>> when ACE     encoded, so you won't know if it's a real U-label
>> until after     running Punycode and possibly overflowing. So
>> if this sentence was     meant to imply that you don't need to
>> check for overflow, then     it's wrong (and if it's not meant
>> to imply that, then it's     misleading.)
>
> Sigh.  Back when we had a 63-octet limit on U-labels, overflow
> was not possible.  We removed that limit and no one thought to
> check this.

Sorry, but if you think that it's impossible that a 63-octet limited 
U-label produce an A-label with more than 63 octets, then that's wrong.

It's very simple to construct an example label:
abcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikaü

The ü takes 2 octets, so overall, this is 63 octets in UTF-8. It is 
definitely longer than 63 octets in punycode, because just only the 
US-ASCII (61 characters/octets) and the xn-- prefix (4 
characters/octets) add up to 65 octets, without yet having encoded the 
"ü". Indeed playing around a bit at http://josefsson.org/idn.php/, the 
longest U-label of this type that works is
abcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdeü
(56 characters/57 bytes in UTF-8), producing
xn--abcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcdefghikabcde-8yf
(63 bytes).

Good to see we discovered another false reason for the 
63-octets-on-UTF-8 length limit, and therefore another reason for 
abolishing said limit.

Regards,   Martin.

> Have restructured the sentence.


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