draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi

[Lyman Chapin]

John,

If you type "http://320.170.98.32" into an old version of Internet  
Explorer (if I remember correctly, Windows 95 vintage), you'll get to  
the main IETF web page as surely as if you had typed "http:// 
64.170.98.32" (or "http://www.ietf.org" for that matter). This is  
just an artifact of the way in which software interfaces interpret  
what users enter, not an observation about the DNS or the encoding of  
data fields -

- Lyman

On Mar 7, 2009, at 7:35 PM, John C Klensin wrote:

>
>
> --On Saturday, March 07, 2009 11:01 -0500 Lyman Chapin
> <lyman at acm.org> wrote:
>
>> Martin and Andrew,
>>
>> Although it seems that numeric values above 255 would be safe,
>> some   software looks only at the low-order 8 bits of a number
>> encoded in a   16-bit (for example) field (ignoring any
>> high-order bits) when it   "knows" that a numeric value will
>> always be 255 or less. In that case   only the 8 low-order
>> bits (10011010) of 666 (...01010011010) would be   recognized.
>> Entering "666" into such an interface would be equivalent   to
>> entering "154".
>
> Lyman,
>
> I'm completely confused and don't know what you are talking
> about.  If the issue is domain names, expressed the preferred
> syntax of dot-separated ASCII characters, "666" is as good as
> "ABC" or "ACM".  If the issue is numeric values, the DNS spec
> understand only octets and not, e.g., 16 (UTF-16?) or 32
> (UTF-32/UCS-4) data fields.  The last I looked, it was quite
> hard to fit a decimal number larger than 255 into an octet.
>
> So, what are you saying?
>
>     john
>