Re: [idn] An ignorant question about TC<-> SC

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

--On 2001-10-26 12.48 -0400 ben <ben@cc-www.com> wrote:

> Thanks for pointing out the confusion.  Perhaps just the word "script"
> is better.  To clarify what I mean, it is to label a Chinese domain
> name as <idn>.<traditional> or <idn>.<simplified> (and not
> <idn>.<chinese> as this serves no purpose) inorder to take out the
> guess work for the CDN users.

This implies that the DNS server need to know how to do matchings between
different charsets (I switch term), for example between BIG5 and some
version of GB, or between ISO-8859-1 and ISO-8859-11. Given some 1000
charsets, the server need to have huge equivalence tables, because in DNS,
we only do exact matchings.

Instead of asking the server to do all of this work, one can force the
client to translate the local charset to one and only one. The server then
only need to know how to match within that charset. And, the client only
need to know how to map from the local charset to the unified one.

We then took one more step and asked the clients to also do normalisation,
so the servers can do matchings based on direct comparison on the bits
which is the representation of the domain name itself.

   paf