On Saturday 31 March 2007 16:06, Philip Hazel wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, John W. Baxter wrote:
> > Philip, you'll also be retired before the major annoyance that will be
> > caused by opening up domain names to non-ASCII (which seems to be
> > steamrollering ahead). Good timing.
>
> Exim has for some time supported UTF-8 domain names, experimentally.
> However, it doesn't support the weird encodings that have been proposed
> - I haven't kept up with the debate, so I don't know what has finally
> been agreed.
We're talking about IDNA (the whole system) and Punycode (the particular
encoding of a domain label into an ascii string, which is then appended to
the "xn--" ACE prefix). Exim shouldn't need any changes - only where IDNs are
presented to or input from the user support is needed. Some validity checking
could be called for in some places though.
> But I've recently grown very skeptical about this whole issue if the new
> arrangement is going to allow registration of names like amazon.com
> where the o in amazon is not an oh, but an omicron, which looks the same
> as an oh when displayed. That really will be the largest can of worms
> ever. We have enough trouble with o/0/O 1/l etc. already.
Technically it will. There has been a lot of debate over this. I think it
becomes the responsibility of the registries not to allow domain names that
can be confused in that manner. As an example, the only non-ascii
characters .se allows are å, ä, ö, and ü.
--
Magnus Holmgren holmgren@???
(No Cc of list mail needed, thanks)
