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

[Rob Austein <sra@hactrn.net>]

Sigh.

1) Speaking just of DNS itself (not the apps that use it), DNS names
   with the 2**7 bit turned on in one or more octets are perfectly
   legal.  There is absolutely nothing to forbid them in the DNS specs
   themselves.  It is not quite eight bit clean due to some case
   insensitivity silliness for the octet values that match the ASCII
   letters, but other than that one is free to put arbitrary binary
   goop into DNS labels.

2) The restriction of DNS names to ASCII letters, digits, and a few
   punctuation characters comes from application specs (eg, 2822),
   registry policies, and implementation restrictions.

3) Back before the IDN WG existed, Microsoft tried to engage the DNS
   WG du jour (DNSIND, I think) on the subject of IDNs, in particular
   to discuss whether using UTF-8 per RFC 2277 was the right thing.
   The WG consensus was that Microsoft should foad.  So Microsoft did
   what the applicable DNS standards and the IETF's BCP on character
   sets at the time said they should, and added UTF-8 support.

So while it would be a good thing for Microsoft to ship the latest and
greatest IDN junk ASAP, I don't think it's fair to fault Microsoft for
having shipped UTF-8 DNS in the past.