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

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 9:10 PM -0500 7/15/01, Eric A. Hall wrote:
>The format of a master file needs to be agreed on. This is required for
>DNS to operate properly.

There is a *large* amount of disagreement here. The fact that the 
zone file was made standard by RFC 1034/1035 does not mean it is 
needed. Nothing exchanges zone files, so there is no interoperational 
impact.

Further, even if you wanted to have a standard zone file format, you 
can create precursors to the zone file in any format. It could be a 
text file in UTF-8, a text file in GB, a bunch of dialog boxes, an 
SQL database, and so on. (All of those are already in use today.) 
Quite frankly, I doubt that many non-BIND DNS systems create 
compliant zone files from their much-friendlier input formats unless 
you ask them to.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium