[wg-c] Special characters in DNS names

["Roeland M.J. Meyer" <rmeyer@mhsc.com>]

[For some this is a side-bar and this whole thing probably should include
name-droppers]

WRT native language character sets:

I have looked and thought over Bill's ideac wrt NUBIND and other instances
of NLS support in the DNS and other infrastructure tools. On its face, it
seems to be a good idea becasue it will make the Internet more friendly.
However, it will also make the Internet harder to manage and very much more
unfriendly to those who do NOT use that character set.

The envisioned use; someone in china, using a web-browser, to look up other
web-servers in china, is probably a no-brainer. Of course, it will be a
benefit. The problem is someone, in france, tracing a spammer, via IP
address, using nslookup, get chinese characters as a response. Chances are
real good that they won't be able to read the name. It will be a non-answer
for them.

Like it as not, the International character set seems to be Latin-1.
Anything else would trigger a "Babel" syndrome.


> From: owner-wg-c@dnso.org [mailto:owner-wg-c@dnso.org]On Behalf Of Karl
> Auerbach
> Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 10:46 AM
>
> Regarding principles or rules:
>
> I perfectly expect that a legitimate and reasonable proposal
> for a new TLD will be some sequence of characters that make no sense in
> English or any European language but make complete sense in some Asian
> language.
>
> Since the suggested principles/rules all carry a strong aspect of
> linguistic and cultural predetermination, I suggest that they are not
> particularly useful principles/rules for a global, multi-cultural,
> multi-lingual, internet.