referencing IDNA2008 (and IDNA2003?)

J-F C. Morfin jfc at morfin.org
Fri Oct 22 22:46:52 CEST 2010


At 20:38 22/10/2010, Adam Barth wrote:
>I'm not sure I quite understood everything that was mentioned during
>this thread.  Concretely, here's what cookies need to do:

To make sure we all understand well I think it would be nice to be 
sure we talk of the same things in documenting:

- who is "we"
- what does mean "receive from the network"
- what is the user agent
- where do we have the URL from ? (in reference for example to the 
RFC 5895 special case).
- X is a lowercase A-label

Suggestion: to be sure you cannot be mistaken, do not consider 
U-Label as Unicoded Labels you could match one way or another, but as 
User-Labels which can be many different things ranging from ASCII 
label to a converted snap of user fingers as Portzamparc hinted it. 
You will _never_ know which UTS 36, RFC 5895, etc. etc. process has 
been used to convert U-labels into lowercase A-labels. Just remember 
that at Project.FRA we do not know yet (we want to experiment first 
with people from many other languages) how we will support plain 
French language "U-labels" as far as majuscules are concerned (same 
for other Latin languages). Being a majuscule as impact on the words 
meaning and this is one of the metadata information Unicode does not support.

I understand that you want to "specify the syntax and semantics of 
these headers as they are actually used _on_ the Internet." IMHO you 
follow the same thinking as IDNA2003, while IDNA2008 should make you 
say "_through_ the Internet". You want to document "on the rope" 
something now documented as being "off the rope" (still networked but 
controlled by the user). You meet the same problem as the WG/IDNABIS 
met. A problem of IS/MUST/SHOULD/MIGHT that demands that you clarify 
the scope of the communication process you want to stabilize to 
understand where you can use MUST, SHOULD and MIGHT - and if IS/ARE 
have to be considered that are imposed on you.

IMHO to be off universal good value cookies should only be Internet 
documented semi-stable data containers (therefore relying only on 
inner Internet controlled elements such as A-labels).

You cannot know all the different ways people will use it. But you 
must tell them that if they want to use it in your way, they MUST 
follow that you say. And, because you write a MUST you MUST be in 
control of the feasibility of what you demand. On an "end to end" 
basis you only control the "inner Internet" (within the Iron Curtain) 
DNS entry/output, i.e. the lowercase A-label. And you can also trust 
it: they are the xn-- labels Registries have actually registered, 
under IDNA2003 and IDNA2008. By nature a robust architecture is 
synergetic. This is synergetics.

Seen that way, your cookies makes things simple and the whole net 
simpler and more robust (RFC 3439) and inscrease the robustness of 
the whole internet.

jfc



>1) We receive a sequence of octets from the network, which we convert
>to lower case.  Let's call this X.
>2) We have a URL that the user agent has used to generate an HTTP
>request.  Let's call the host name component of this URL Y.
>3) X is a sequence of octets that's has all the crazy xn-- stuff.
>4) We need to transform Y to the crazy xn-- form to see if it's in
>some relation to X.
>5) For our sanity, we'd like to use octet-by-octet comparison, without
>reference to any kind of folding (e.g., case-folding, IDNA-folding,
>etc).
>
>As an added constraint, we don't feel its our place to mandate to user
>agents whether they ought to use IDNA2003 or IDNA2008.  User agents
>are free to make the decision independently of what the cookie spec
>says.  You should feel free to lobby them one way or another, but
>we're not going to impose that requirement on them in this document.
>
>My understanding is that the text in the spec meets our requirements.
>If that's not the case, please let me know.
>
>Adam
>
>
>On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 7:48 AM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 10:29:19AM -0400, Vint Cerf wrote:
> >> andrew,
> >>
> >> we were pretty explicit that the algorithm that produces A-labels
> >> produces only lower case. check with John Klensin.
> >
> > I remember talking about it, and I remember this being an issue
> > because Punycode does not actually require lower case.  But I can't
> > put my fingers on the text where it says this right now.  I haven't
> > looked that hard, however.
> >
> > The reason I haven't looked hard is that it doesn't matter.  There is
> > absolutely no way we can enforce any restriction in the DNS that
> > requires the label to remain lower case.  Though DNS is supposed to be
> > ASCII-case-preserving but ASCII-case-insensitive, the plain fact is
> > that not every implementation does this, or does it correctly.  (I
> > recall quite clearly pointing this out during the WG discussions,
> > because some implementations use compression pointers to the original
> > query string and therefore get whatever was asked by an application.)
> > Applications can put their LDH queries in _in any case at all_ and
> > have them work.  An IDNA2008-unaware stack with an IDNA2008-aware
> > application above might do anything, including converting everything
> > in the label to upper case (try logging into an old-fashioned UNIX
> > console with the caps lock on.  You'll do a lookup for XN--SOMETHING
> > no matter what you intend).  If it does that, and happens to query
> > through a caching name server, the upper case form will persist in the
> > cache.  You still have to treat that label as matching the lower case
> > U-label.  We couldn't do all this above the DNS if you didn't have to.
> >
> > The case-preserving, case-insensitive feature of DNS was, in my
> > opinion, a grave error.  But it's an error we have to live with
> > forever if we're going to continue using DNS.  You simply cannot build
> > a case-sensitive layer atop the DNS if any of the US-ASCII code points
> > in the labels you want to use are themselves to be case sensitive.  If
> > you want to do something clever like Punycode, only for the entire
> > Unicode range (i.e. including that which overlaps with US-ASCII) so
> > that you never have a transparent map between the DNS name and the
> > user-presented name, then you have the possibility of introducing case
> > sensitivity to the naming system (but not the DNS).  Otherwise, you're
> > out of luck.
> >
> > A
> >
> >
> > --
> > Andrew Sullivan
> > ajs at shinkuro.com
> > Shinkuro, Inc.
> >
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