Distributed configuration of "private" IDNA (Re: IDNA and getnameinfo() and getaddrinfo())

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 03:39:43PM -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:

> It does.  However, there's no way that anyone will bother making
> getaddrinfo(), DNS resolver, and application implementations that
> actually know when to send A-labels versus when to send something else,
> much less what that something else ought to be.

I think this is probably right.

> DNS can't work interoperably with multiple IDN rulesets for the simple
> reason that to do so would require code to decide amongst IDN rules to
> apply in context-specific manners.  

Right.  See John Klensin's previous remarks about this: in small
communities of well-known behaviour, your favourite encoding as octets
in the zone work fine.  But given that we have multiple different
encodings, we surely do have a problem.  It's nevertheless simply too
late to say that the only thing anyone is allowed to put in a DNS zone
is an A-label.  We don't get to reformat the Internet like that.  The
DNS rules were established a long time ago, so there _is_ non-A-label
data in zone files already.

> If you really, really want this to work, then start thinking about
> solutions along the lines of my strawman proposal for an NS-like RR that
> indicates what IDN rules apply to delegated zones.  I'd rather help make
> IDNA2008 better by working on the APIs aspect of the problem.

I suggested similar things more than once over the past couple years,
and people told me every time that I might be running for the position
of "Bad Idea Fairy".

A

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