Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 17:32:24 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Gunnar Lindberg <lindberg(_at_)cdg(_dot_)chalmers(_dot_)se>
Message-ID:
<200204041532(_dot_)RAA03117(_at_)wilfer1(_dot_)cdg(_dot_)chalmers(_dot_)se>
| Unless I'm misstaken 0x2E == US ASCII '.'
Yes.
| Of course, this character never occurs inside the DNS itself,
Nonsense. Rarely occurs perhaps, but absolutely any 8 bit value
can occur in a domain name in the DNS. *ANY*.
The DNS has never had any kind of problem with dealing with 8 bit
data, all it has ever lacked was rules for interpretation. Simply
saying "It is UTF-8" would fix that part. But so would "It is 8859-1"
except that would not be a wonderful choice. "It is UCS-2" (or 4) might
perhaps be OK, but would be horribly in-compatible with what is deployed.
| But, how are "8-bit clean" applications supposed to handle domain
| names where these symbols occur mixed with "normal" US ASCII domain
| symbols & separators - think of
|
| www."PEACE SYMBOL".org
| www 0x2E 0x26 0x2E 0x2E org
Trivial.
len 3, value "www"
len 2, value 0x26 0x2E
len 3, value "org"
len 0
(though I suspect the UTF-8 encoded value of 0x262e would be 3
bytes long, and would not include any US-ASCII lookalikes - that is
one of the features of UTF-8)
| (this discussion could have made use of some of that :-). So, there
| is a need to encode anyway.
Nonsense.
The only need for encoding appears in the other applications whose rules for
dealing with domain names are more restricted.
If people arguing about this stuff actually had half a clue about how
the DNS actually works, things would be much easier.
kre