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

On tisdag, jan 7, 2003, at 15:57 Europe/Stockholm, RJ Atkinson wrote:


	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.
This is wrong. It is allowed to have any value in the octets in a label. Including NULL as the labels has a length indicator.

UTF-8 ought never appear because (a) it can not be distinguished from other charset encodings -- and IETF is not ready to say UTF-8 is _THE_ encoding of Unicode to use in DNS forever (especially as Unicode changes) and (b) "just" saying UTF-8 is not enough as the normalization is the most important step when increasing the number of characters allowed (non-UTF-8 forces people like Microsoft to do some hacking) and (c) application protocols can not handle UTF-8, and using a different encoding in for example SMTP than DNS is a bad thing, because people will not re-encode things.

paf