Re: Sending the original (Unicode) domain name as well as the ACE?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Tue, Aug 06, 2002 at 09:03:50AM +0200,
 Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote 
 a message of 16 lines which said:

> it could be a good idea, for the registry, to store the original
> (Unicode) form of an IDN, as well as its ACE (ASCII-encoded) form. 
...
> Am I correct when reading draft-ietf-provreg-epp-domain-04.txt that it
> contains nothing about transmitting the original form from the
> registrar, which knows it, to the registry?

Funny, but I did not notice yet that
draft-ietf-provreg-epp-contact-04.txt (which does not deal with IDN at
all) suggests exactly that for contact information.

  - One or two <contact:postalInfo> elements that contain postal address
  information.  Two elements are provided so that address information
  can be provided in both internationalized and localized forms.  If an
  internationalized form is provided, it MUST be listed first and
  element content MUST be represented in a subset of UTF-8 that can be
  represented in the 7-bit US-ASCII character set.  If a localized form
  is provided, element content MAY be represented in unrestricted UTF-8.
  The <contact:postalInfo> element contains the following child
  elements:

I'm curious about the rationale. Why not just accepting Unicode and
translating it to ASCII when necessary? Is it because automatic
transliteration of Unicode to ASCII is quite difficult so we prefer
that the registrar does it?