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Re: [idn] Document Status?

James Seng <jseng@pobox.org.sg> wrote:

> To be even more precies, domain names don't deal with characters
> either.  It deals with bits that represent codepoints, that may be
> grapheme that forms characters.

In Unicode terminology, no code point represents multiple characters,
and no code point represents a part of a character.  Each code point
represents one character (or no characters).

A case can be made that domain names do (or should) deal with
characters.  The domain label "nicemice" is a sequence of eight
characters.  They happen to be represented by ASCII codes whenever the
are sent via DNS (or most other protocols), but the label can also
be written on paper, or represented in EBCDIC.  Its essence is the
characters, not the bits.

At least, that's the view taken by URIs.  A URI is explicitly defined
as a sequence of characters, not bytes, and one field of most URIs is a
domain name.

AMC