[DNSOP] Status of IDNA

[Florian Weimer <[e-mail]>]

What's the current standardization status of IDNA?

As far as I can tell, a lot of vendors are still stuck with the original 
IDNA standard (IDNA2003).  There are three or more competing successors, 
IDNA2008 as standardized by the IETF (without any tweaks), the Unicode 
IDNA standard TS46 (<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr46/>, which is 
configurable and allegedly compatible with IETF IDNA2008, but is not 
because it yields different results than IETF IDNA2008), and the 
Mozilla/DENIC IDNA implementation in Firefox/Thunderbird 
(<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479520> and other sources).

These aren't compatible.  You can see this by visiting 
<https://www.buße.de/> in different browsers.

Is there an ongoing effort to reconcile application behavior?  Different 
TLDs appear to expect different IDNA implementations.

One practical problem with IDNA2003 is that it prevents having Hebrew 
domain names containing ASCII digits.  Any of the IDNA2008 variants 
mentioned above will fix that, I think, but it's difficult to pick a 
variant to implement.  And I certainly don't want to implement per-TLD 
policies.

Thanks,
Florian