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Re: [Fwd: Request for Advice on VGRS IDN Announcement]



On Tuesday, Jan 7, 2003, at 09:32 America/Montreal, Thomas Narten wrote:

	We should also note that the issue arises in part because a
very widely deployed web browser (hint: Internet Exploder) emits
invalid DNS requests that use UTF8 -- and that any such {browser,
DNS resolver} implementation is badly broken and needs to get
patched immediatley by the implementer (Microsoft) so that the
{browser, DNS resolver} fully complies with all DNS standards.
Actually, is this true? Where in the DNS specs is it defined what to
do when an application wants to do a DNS lookup for a non-ascii
string? I may be wrong, but I thought that this is an area of the
standards where things are somewhat underspecified.
If one asserts that things are so underspecified that the MS
behaviour is not invalid, then the only logical conclusion is that the
same "under-specification" means the Verisign behaviour is not necessarily
invalid.

Folks much smarter than I about DNS stuff have long told me that
UTF8 ought never appear on the wire in a DNS packet because it was
not valid per the specs. I'm happy to defer to the local DNS experts
of course.

Ran