UTF-8

Andrew Sullivan ajs at shinkuro.com
Fri Jun 18 23:33:00 CEST 2010


On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 03:38:19PM -0500, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> thing.  However, given that no one is supposed to send non-ASCII (and in
> some cases non-LDH), it's always possible that some implementors could

No, this is what I'm trying to explain you're mistaken about.  A valid
DNS query can include just about any octets -- octets, note, not
multibyte characters -- you like.  Given that a particular octet might
be one "character" in UTF-8, a different "character" in ISO-8859-1, a
still different "character" in IS)-8859-5, or might be none of the
above, it is simply wrong to make assumptions about what queries
include in this way.

> IDNA is unavoidable, so there's little point in bothering to use
> non-ASCII on the wire in DNS.

Yes.  On this we agree in the public DNS.  But the point Dave
especially was trying to make, I think (and I don't want to put words
into his mouth), is that if you think you can make that assumption
generally today, you are simply wrong.  Too bad, so sad, but that's
the way it is.

> In this context I don't care what "longtime IETF participants" think.
> I care what the middleboxes do.

Never mind middleboxes (because yes, they make life complicated).
Think just about applications that think they're doing reasonable DNS
sanity-checking.  There are _still_ places I can't put my .info email
addresses, because of some heuristic that no TLD is longer than 3
characters.  We're not even into the interesting problems, and we're
already broken.

If I've read you right, you want to say what people MUST do.  I think
that's a mistake.  I think the best advice is to say that certain
practices maximize interop, that using either of A-label or U-label
(with adequate type checking) will work, and that it would probably be
best to settle on [pick one.  I prefer A-label, but I don't care that
much because they're freely convertible].  If the latter is what
you've been saying, I am sorry that I so badly misunderstood.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at shinkuro.com
Shinkuro, Inc.


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