ietf-822
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Re: Mail addresses and extended character sets

2001-06-27 07:29:47

Hmmm! It looks as though I will have to wait until the dust settles a
little. I am assuming that it will finally take the form of some encoding
into ASCII that will satisfy the present addr-spec syntax. But my concerns
are:

1. There are too many encoding schemes around already; one hopes that
they will come up with something identical to, or readily adaptable from,
one of the existing ones.

there are too many other constraints that have to be satisfied, including
concerns from users of various ideographic languages that the 63-character
per-label limit in DNS prevents them from encoding names of reasonable length
in their languages.  so you end up needing some kind of special-purpose
compression.

2. That there should only be ONE way to encode a given domain name (or
local-part, for that matter). 

it's very likely that things will end up this way, for the simple reason 
that folks don't want to break existing DNS servers and caches.   so 
even though there might be multiple ways to encode a non-ascii domain name
in Unicode (say, using combining and non-combining characters), after 
canonicalization and ascii-encoding these should all fold to the same 
representation.

Keith