Re: [ietf-provreg] EPP and IDN

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

[IMHO, IANAL and I never wrote an EPP server.]

On Thu, Jul 31, 2003 at 09:59:11AM +0200,
 Klaus Malorny <Klaus.Malorny@knipp.de> wrote 
 a message of 30 lines which said:

> can anyone tell me something about the relation between EPP and IDN?

EPP itself (which I believe is Unicode-clean) or one of the mappings?
The current domain mapping does not seem to allow IDN. domain-07 says:

  The syntax for domain and host names described in this document MUST
  conform to [RFC952] as updated by [RFC1123].  These conformance
  requirements might change as a result of progressing work in
  developing standards for internationalized domain names.

<troll>Now that RFC 3490 is out, may be we should stop the draft
documents and rewrite that part before resending them to the
IESG?</troll>

> But is my assumption correct that the base protocol itself does not
> limit the use of internationalized names in domains and host
> objects?

Yes.

> I mean since XML is able to transport the full Unicode character
> set, it should be possible to specify non-ASCII characters in
> domainname related elements.

Right, -09 says:

  EPP is represented in XML, which provides native support for encoding
  information using the Unicode character set and its more compact
  representations including UTF-8.  Conformant XML processors recognize
  both UTF-8 and UTF-16.

> Or does the protocol require that those names are transmitted in
> their Punycode equivalent, as it happens (AFAIK) in Verisign's
> current RRP implementation? Is the choice between the "presentation
> form" and Punycode at descretion of the implementing registry?

I believe so. Basically, it depends on what you sell and bill, Unicode
names or ACE strings. (It has a lot of consequences, for instance
legal ones: think of a normalization change, for instance, or a
dispute about a trademark expressed in Unicode.)