[ietf-provreg] Re: EPP Extensions for IDN

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:14:39AM -0400,
 Francisco Obispo <fobispo@nic.ve> wrote 
 a message of 75 lines which said:

> We just encoded the domain name at the client into XML compatible
> form (i.e: espaņol.com.ve -> espa&#241;ol.com.ve),

That's a strange sentence. EPP is based on XML and, for an application
which uses a XML parser, espaņol is exactly the same as espa&#241;ol
(most XML parsers do not even inform the application what was the
original form).

To quote some relevant parts of RFC 3730 :

   All XML instances SHOULD begin with an <?xml?> declaration to
   identify the version of XML that is being used, optionally identify
   use of the character encoding used, and optionally provide a hint to
   an XML parser that an external schema file is needed to validate the
   XML instance.  Conformant XML parsers recognize both UTF-8 (defined
   in RFC 2279 [RFC2279]) and UTF-16 (defined in RFC 2781 [RFC2781]);
   per RFC 2277 [RFC2277] UTF-8 is the RECOMMENDED character encoding
   for use with EPP.

See also section 5, "Internationalization Considerations". I would say
that an EPP server which does *not* accept espaņol is *not* a
compliant EPP server.