Getting closer...important IETF draft released

[zfreud]

Direct from the source. John C. Kleinsen in particular deserves high praise for his efforts in making IDN a reality on both technical and policy fronts. That said, this document again highlights for me the uncertainty of DNAME's adoption.


Review and Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/...xtsteps-05.txt

The chief purpose of this document is to provide a survey of issues that have been raised with regards to the deployment of IDNs and propose potential avenues for exploring and/or resolving them.



From the Abstract:
This note describes issues raised by the deployment and use of
Internationalized Domain Names. It describes problems both at the
time of registration and those for use of those names for use in the
DNS. It recommends that IETF should update the IDN related RFCs and
a framework to be followed in doing so, as well as summarizing and
identifying some work that is required outside the IETF. In
particular, it proposes that some changes be investigated for the
IDNA standard and its supporting tables, based on experience gained
since those standards were completed.

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by zfreud

Direct from the source. John C. Kleinsen in particular deserves high praise for his efforts in making IDN a reality on both technical and policy fronts. That said, this document again highlights for me the uncertainty of DNAME's adoption.
.

I agree that he has done some very important work on this project. However, John is on record as wishing to have much more time than he is actually going to be afforded. This is a problem of ICANNs own making because it has dragged its feet for far too long. It is now commited to a three month time frame for the Testbed, and it will need to come up with some very good reasons if it is not to go live by year end.

<<<3.2.3. IDN TLDs

The IAB has concluded that there is not one IDN TLD issue but at
least three very separate ones:

o Assuming there are to be IDN entries in the root zone at all, a
decision must be made as to what TLDs are to be created and how
they are to be named. This decision falls within the traditional
IANA scope and is an ICANN issue today.
o There has been discussion of permitting some or all existing TLDs
to be referenced by multiple labels, with those labels presumably
representing some understanding of the "name" of the TLD in
different languages. If actual aliases of this type are desired
for existing domains, the IETF may need to consider whether the
use of DNAME records in the root is appropriate to meet that need,
what constraints, if any, are needed, whether alternate
approaches, such as those of [RFC4185], are appropriate or whether
further alternatives should be investigated. But, to the extent
to which aliases are considered desirable and feasible, decisions
presumably must be made as to which, if any, root IDN labels
should be associated with DNAME records and which ones should be
handled by normal delegation records or other mechanisms. That
decision is one of DNS root-level namespace policy and hence falls
to ICANN although we would expect ICANN to pay careful attention
to any technical, operational, or security recommendations that
may be produced by other bodies.
o Finally, if IDN labels are to be placed in the root zone, there
are issues associated with how they are to be encoded and
deployed. This area may have implications for work that has been
done, or should be done, in the IETF.>>>

This suggests to me that there are huge issues associated with the alternative to DNames and a growing recognition that they will at best only provide a partial solution that will need to be supplemented by DName in any case. Frankly, I cannot see the point, but they are now committed to going through the motions.