looking up domain names with unassigned code points
Frank Ellermann
hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz at gmail.com
Thu May 15 23:17:38 CEST 2008
Shawn Steele wrote:
> I surf for one of the web-based ones when I need to convert.
+1. Used to an Unicode-ignorant platform it even took me some
time to figure out how to produce an unassigned UTF-8 code for
a funny "I <unassigned black telephone dingbat> Unicode" title
of a blog entry in reply to Mark's 5.1 article.
Some Wordpad Alt-X magic finally did the trick - using an NCR
produced a feed validator warning, and warnings are bad news.
> Consider also the IMA/EAI UTF-8 effort. Clients that get a
> pretty UTF-8 name aren't going to be able to process that
> name if they can't do the punycode conversion to do the DNS
> query because they're on the wrong version of IDN. Sure,
> they can (hopefully) use the fallback address, but I suspect
> that'll have a human readable name, not a punycode string.
AFAIK that affects only the RHS (domain part), for the LHS
(local part) knowing what the UTF-8 means is not essential:
The MSA can be (again) a "smart host" wrt EAI, and clients
aren't forced to support punycode if they can handle UTF-8.
The same goes for say whois servers vs. whois clients.
Frank
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