Some reading on IRIs and IDNs

[Jason McBrayer]

Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> writes:

> On Wed, Dec 09, 2020 at 12:26:51AM -0500,
>  Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote 
>  a message of 73 lines which said:
>
>> DNS *can* support UTF-8, but such support isn't wide, nor is it a
>> standard.
>
> Wrong. DNS 2181, which clarifies that "any binary string whatever can
> be used as the label of any resource record" is part of the Standards
> Track. The reasons why few people use UTF-8 in domain names are:

How widespread is support in client resolver libraries and in servers,
though? It's one thing to say, "yes, the standard is to support
non-ASCII names", and another entirely to say "just sending non-ASCII
names to your DNS server will work".

> There is an implemention of Punycode in every standard library,
> whatever your language.

Not strictly true. There isn't one in Common Lisp's standard library,
for example. There is one in Quicklisp, the widely used package
repository though, so that's okay for me.

I kind of feel like we should just bite the bullet and admit that a
fully-compliant client needs to punycode domains when looking them up,
and encode URLs when sending them to the server, and that
fully-compliant servers need to decode URLs when resolving them.

-- 
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Jason F. McBrayer                    jmcbray at carcosa.net  |
| A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, |
| even though we do not love it.            -- Dogen        |