Subject: Re: DNSEXT WGLC: Unknown types support

From: Erik Nordmark <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 15:47:35 +0200 (CEST)

> 2) DNS (from RFC 883 through the present day) is case-insensitive but
>    case-preserving for the range of octet values that correspond to
>    the US-ASCII alphabet.  Basicly, this means that DNS preserves case
>    in DNS labels when it's convenient for an implementation to do so,
>    but you can't assume that case has been preserved in any particular
>    DNS name (except, maybe, for the leftmost label of a DNS name).
> 
> 3) I would redirect any follow-up on point (2) to the IDN WG, except
>    that (a) anything that anyone could possibly say on this subject
>    has almost certainly already been said there, and (b) James and
>    Marc would hurt me. :)

Indepedent of the IDN I think the DNS protocol specifications must be
clear on how octets above 128 are processed, since all values are legal
in the domain names as carried in the DNS protocol.

Saying "case insensitive" is IMHO not sufficiently well defined.
Saying that the octet values in the US-ASCII range are compared
case insenstively but other octet values (128-255) are compared
exactly would be a more clear specification.
Similarly for "lower case".

  Erik

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2002 11:28:47 -0400

> exactly would be a more clear specification.

i agree.

there is no necessity to specify that character processing is
performed for octet values (128-255).

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From: Rob Austein <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2002 12:40:25 -0400

> Similarly for "lower case".

Yet another of those things that (a) seemed "obvious" back when we all
knew that one of the most heavily used server platforms on the
Internet represented text as 7-bit bytes and (b) somehow never got
written down in all the years since that platform went away.

Yes, we probably need another short clarifying document, or another
section to some omnibus clarifying document, or something.