From: Henry Spencer (henry@spsystems.net)
Date: Tue Apr 16 2002 - 11:56:25 CDT
On Tue, 16 Apr 2002, Charles Lindsey wrote:
> >http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-idn-punycode-01.txt
>
> Wow! What a complicated bag of tricks!
> But its biggest problem seems to be the use of '-' as a delimiter, which
> is bad news for us since we are interested in newsgroups names that have
> been converted by changing each '.' into a '-'. I presume they chose '-'
> because it is not supposed to occur in a domain name.
No, actually, '-' is quite legitimate in domain names, indeed moderately
common (e.g., bell-labs.com).
> So if punycode were to be used for the local-part of an addr-spec we might
> see
> uk-net-news-announce@moderators.isc.org
> Now it has to decide whether 'uk-net-news-announce' stands for itself, or
> is a punycoding of some dreadful Unicode stuff.
Speaking without having actually dug through the various nested drafts,
note that the one referenced above mentions some sort of prefix that has
to appear at the beginning of the string to mark it as punycode.
Henry Spencer
henry@spsystems.net