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

[Dave Thaler]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nicolas Williams [mailto:Nicolas.Williams at oracle.com]
> Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 1:40 PM
> To: Andrew Sullivan
> Cc: John C Klensin; cheshire at apple.com; idna-update at alvestrand.no; Dave
> Thaler
> Subject: Re: Distributed configuration of "private" IDNA (Re: IDNA and
> getnameinfo() and getaddrinfo())
> 
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 04:22:09PM -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 11:11:55AM -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> > >
> > > See "First: to note that...".  That is: I don't think DNS, much less
> > > _application_ implementors can be expected to support private DNS
> > > clouds with non-standard IDN rules.  It's just too big a PITA.
> >
> > Hold on, there.  The DNS allows _octets_ in domain name labels.  That
> > ...
> 
> 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.

Not true.   We already have many widely deployed applications that attempt to
do exactly that (IE is one of them, and there's a number of others).  And of
course they get it wrong in corner cases, so few people notice.

I talked about some of them near the end of the IETF plenary talk.

-Dave