Re: [DNSOP] draft-liman-tld-names-04

[Tony Finch <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, 16 Nov 2010, David Conrad wrote:

> 1123 says:

in the informative text

> Note that it says 'will be alphabetic' not 'will contain an alphabetic'.

The prediction has already been broken by IDNA.

I read it as a statement of the then-current TLD allocation policy, not
the host name syntax, and an explanation of why the full syntactic
check will not lead to ambiguity.

> Also, just speaking of current policy, 2-letter TLDs are restricted to
> what's in the ISO-3166 list

This is also part of the allocation policy not the syntax. I note you
didn't say "two character" :-)

> > and IDNA depends on it being allowed.
>
> Sorry?

IDNA TLD A-labels are not alphabetic. Non-IDNA software can still use them.

The problem with this document is it mixes up syntax and policy and the
A-label and U-label layers. I think the raw syntax should remain as simple
as possible and all restrictions such as alphabetic-only should be left to
the policy layer. It is good to document the policy concisely as in this
document, but it should be clear that it applies to the form of domain
names as seen by users and not to lower level code.

Tony.
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