RE: A Comment on 9. [1] of the requirements document.

["Hollenbeck, Scott" <shollenbeck@verisign.com>]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: George Belotsky [mailto:george@register.com]
>Sent: Friday, April 13, 2001 12:43 PM
>To: ietf-provreg@cafax.se
>Subject: A Comment on 9. [1] of the requirements document.
>
>
>Section 9. [1] is quoted below.
>
>
>"  [RFC1035] restricts the encoding of Internet host and domain names
>   in the DNS to a subset of the 7-bit US-ASCII character set.  More
>   recent standards, such as [RFC2130] and [RFC2277], describe the need
>   to develop protocols for an international Internet.  These and other
>   standards MUST be considered during the protocol design process to
>   ensure world-wide usability of a generic registry registrar protocol."
>
>This is not quite correct.  Quote from RFC1035 follows.
>
>"Although labels can contain any 8 bit values in octets that make up a
>label, it is strongly recommended that labels follow the preferred
>syntax described elsewhere in this memo, which is compatible with
>existing host naming conventions.  Name servers and resolvers must
>compare labels in a case-insensitive manner (i.e., A=a), assuming ASCII
>with zero parity.  Non-alphabetic codes must match exactly."
>
>Thus, DNS labels can contain arbitrary octets.  If such labels are
>properly supported by existing software, it may be possible to make
>use this functionality.

The statement is absolutely correct.  Please re-read section 2.3.1,
"Preferred name syntax", starting at the bottom of page 6.  It very clearly
constrains the label space for domain and host names as described.

<Scott/>