[UA-discuss] truly international IDNs, was Armenia

[Jaap Akkerhuis]

 Michael Casadevall writes:

 > <SNIPPED>
 >
 > There is technical issue that comes up is how the stop is processed. In
 > the DNS protocol itself, the dot represents a separator for domain
 > components (which have a max length of 63 ASCII characters) and are also
 > used as markers for DNS compression which is somewhat mandatory to make
 > replies fit within the 512 byte limit.

Strictly speaking, this not how it works.

On the wire, the dots/stops/periods not used as separators between
labels in the protocol. It has always been a custom to use a them as
separators in human readable text and humans have been getting very
used to this. Lot's of applications manipulating labels in the
protocol have followed this custom. But labels itself are defined as a
count followed by the number of bytes. A tool looking up "example.org"
translates this domain name into "\7example\3com". It is the
application which takes care of this. The same case is true for IDNA.
If the preferred se[erator is a different character (and I understand
from the discussion in Armenian it is a colon) then with the proper
LOCALE "example:org" should also result in "\7example\3com" on the
wire.

Regards,

	jaap