Message for Bind-users

Johnny Fribert Lauridsen jlaurids at cisco.com
Wed Jun 14 18:00:53 UTC 2000


In Y2K, it actually does sound weird that many things are still based on 7-bit CP 437, and others
on 8-bit CP 850, ISO 8859/1, etc., etc.  Such code-sets would never satisfy all the world - and
in the Internet case, we are talking about all the world.  Suggesting support for an underscore or
some other odd character is really a real minor in the great picture.  Operating systems developers
have realized this and introduced code-sets like Unicode, MBCS, DBCS and more.  There are even
APIs to handle this in many operating systems.
Maybe it is time to refresh some real old rfcs on these I18N (Internationalization) issues.
/Johnny
At 13:39 14/06/2000 -0400, Kevin Darcy wrote:
>Jim Reid wrote:
>
> > >>>>> "Kevin" == Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> writes:
> >
> >     Kevin> Well, we don't *need* DNS at all: everyone could just use
> >     Kevin> dot-notation IP addresses, or, for that matter, strings of
>Kevin> 1's and 0's. DNS, and underscores, enhance the
> >     Kevin> human/computer interface, or at least are perceived to by
> >     Kevin> many of the humans who use the interface.
> >
> > That doesn't work either unless it gets formalised by a generally
> > agreed protocol. If I was to henceforce declare that the letter 0
> > represented a binary 1 and 1 represented binary 0, I could do it.
> > That doesn't mean the rest of the world should follow suit, even if I
> > wanted them to. (Or use FOOBAR to denote 1 and foobar to denote 0.)  I
> > chose these ridiculous examples for exaggeration to show what happens
> > when people unlilaterally invent their own conventions and refuse to
> > follow defined, generally agreed and implemented standards. Although
> > they're unworkable, the above examples are no less silly than
> > violating RFC1123 and using underscores in hostnames. How many other
> > parts of RFC1123 can someone choose to ignore or overrule?
>
>I'm not suggesting that people violate the standards. I'm suggesting that
>certain standards, or parts of standards, are obsolete and arbitrary and
>unnecessarily restrictive, and that we should a) just simply admit this
>instead of making up bullshit justifications for them and b) change them
>if we can.
>
>
>- Kevin
>
>




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