Q3: What characters should be allowed in a revised IDNA2008 specification?

[Gervase Markham]

On 01/04/09 06:59, John C Klensin wrote:
> These registrations have always violated established advice --
> from the IESG as well as from ICANN and others-- against
> registering labels containing characters that are not used to
> write the words of at least some language.  Long-term support
> for  them simply encourages more such registrations, some of
> which can be problematic (punctuation or symbol characters that
> appear to be slashes or non-label-separating dots being the most
> obvious examples).

As a point of information, given that such "spoofing" characters can 
appear at any level in a domain name, these characters have to be 
"banned" outright by browsers anyway - which is what we do in Firefox:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/modules/libpref/src/init/all.js#744

It's not the most easily understandable format, but I'm sure you can all 
cope with that :-) If people have suggested additions, please do let me 
know.

> The period in which IDNA2003 lookup implementations are
> gradually replaced by IDNA2008 ones should provide a more than
> adequate transition period without taking any special measures.
> Registries and zones that have created and installed such labels
> should certainly work out transition strategies, but the exact
> nature of those strategies is beyond the scope of this WG.

I agree that the protocol does not need to define a transition strategy.

Gerv