Fw: bind international

Jim Reid jim at rfc1035.com
Mon Oct 15 08:12:54 UTC 2001


>>>>> "Manuel" == =?Windows-1252?Q?Manuel Rodr=EDguez Salgado \=28PTG\=29?= <Windows-1252> writes:

    Manuel> I want know a bind version wich resolv: ñ á, ...

If only it was that simple....

The DNS protocol is 8-bit clean. So in principle it could be used to
look up names in any character set. [For some definition of character
set.] However other protocols define a restricted set of ASCII
characters for things like hostnames and email addresses. If some
applications get presented with non-ASCII characters, bad things could
happen. The applications could crash or behave unpredictably. So if
the DNS returns non-ASCII data in those circumstances things like web
browsing and email could stop working. The IETF has a group working on
internationalised DNS. The general idea is some character encoding
scheme is used to map names expressed in "character sets" in any
language -- Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, etc -- into ASCII
strings that won't blow up the world's web browsers and mail
software. Progress in this standardisation activity is slow. It's a
very hard problem.


More information about the bind-users mailing list