>I have been looking for the IANA registry in which the IDNA prefix xn-- is
>allocated and have not been able to find it. I can see the following
>possibilities
>1) There isn't such a registry. The allocation is purely ad hoc
>2) There is a registry but none of the IDNA RFCs bother to list it as a
>normative reference.
>Either one would be bad. The existence or non existence of a registry, the
>allocation or non allocation of a code point is not going to cause me to
>decide whether or not to use functionality. All that the registry achieves is
>to avoid collisions.
Phil, this is very interesting.
The 'xn--', of course, is the prefix for punycode used for International Domain
Names. I have seen it used for DNS resolution quite a bit in the last couple
of months. So, it is certainly used. In fact, that appears to be the only
way one can do DNS resolution (at least in my experience). That is, do the
translation from IDN to punycode. Then, it seems to work like a charm.
Certainly sounds like an update somewhere is needed.
People may be interested in a draft that Harish and I have just posted:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-elkchow-iea-deploy
>From our section 1.1 which explains punycode:
"Languages not based on the Latin script (A, B, C, etc) use unicode to
represent the letters in their alphabet rather than ASCII. Punycode is used to
show unicode characters in ASCII format. It is used in the transport of email.
For example:
English: NehruHindi: नेहरूPunycode: xn--l2bq0a0bw
Punycode will start with the prefix: "xn--". An application handling IDN
domains has to reference an IDN repository to know how to display them. Emails
add to the complication since many email systems pre-date the introduction of
IDNs. These systems often simply reject emails that don't work within the old
domain name model.
Nalini Elkins
Inside Products, Inc.
www.insidethestack.com
(831) 659-8360
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