[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] RDAP for Registration Data Service Upgrade?

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 02:58:11PM +0000, Greg Aaron wrote:
> One of the capabilities of RDAP is that it can handle internationalization needs.  (IDN domain names, and having international character sets appear in registration data fields.)  WHOIS can't do that.

Permit me to indulge my inner pedant: this isn't _quite_ true.  The
behaviour of whois with i18n data is almost completely undefined.  So,
it is possible to put internationalized text in it, but there's no way
to negotiate the encoding, so it can't be done reliably across the
world.  (If we could be sure that everyone was using Unicode all the
time, and in the same encoding with the same normalization, we might
be able to "just do it"; but since different systems store Unicode in
different ways, even that is not reliable.)

So, the conclusion is still right: whois doesn't meet this need, but
in a way that is almost worse than "doesn't support
internationalization", because its support is at best heuristic and
full of assumptions about what might arrive at the server -- a fragile
thing to deploy.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com