Re: [idn] Why follow IDNA with UTF-8?

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

At 00:39 01/07/16 +0000, Adam M. Costello wrote:

>At 14:05 01/07/15 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
>
> > [T]he editing interface to the host file does.  That is pretty
> > trivial: a single script that converts the native-charset file (which
> > does not have to be UTF-8: it can be any native charset) to the host
> > file.  It took me about 5 minutes to write mine in Perl (using an
> > existing ACE<=>UTF-8 routine).
>
>Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org> replied:
>
> > That's five minutes for each different format.  And then that's a few
> > seconds every time a conversion is needed.
>
>Okay, anyone who doesn't like that method can get a DNS server that
>reads UTF-8 zone files directly (I have no doubt that such servers will
>appear)

I also have little doubt this should and will happen. But the current
IDNA draft explicitly specifies that zone files must be in ACE, and
therefore prohibits such implementations.


>and use their favorite UTF-8 capable editor to edit it.  The
>encoding used by the server on the wire is orthogonal to the zone file
>encoding.

Yes, it is. But zone files are one of the easiest places to address
in that respect. Domain names turn up in many more places. How do you
solve the problem for these?

Regards,  Martin.