Re: [DNSOP] Working Group Last Call on draft-ietf-dnsop-terminology-bis

["Paul Hoffman" <[e-mail]>]

On 27 Jun 2018, at 12:56, Dick Franks wrote:

> The document appears to be in good shape.
>
> However, I have some difficulty with the wording of these two 
> paragraphs in
> section 2.
>
>       The basic wire format for names in the global DNS is a list of
>       labels ordered by decreasing distance from the root, with the 
> root
>       label last.  Each label is preceded by a length octet.  
> [RFC1035]
>       also defines a compression scheme that modifies this format.
>
>       The presentation format for names in the global DNS is a list of
>       labels ordered by decreasing distance from the root, encoded as
>       ASCII, with a "." character between each label.  In presentation
>       format, a fully-qualified domain name includes the root label 
> and
>       the associated separator dot.  For example, in presentation
>       format, a fully-qualified domain name with two non-root labels 
> is
>       always shown as "example.tld." instead of "example.tld".
>       [RFC1035] defines a method for showing octets that do not 
> display
>       in ASCII.
>
> The character encoding of "presentation format" depends on the context 
> in
> which it is used. The protocol mandates ASCII encoding of labels on 
> the
> wire.
> It cannot say anything about the internal character encoding 
> conventions of
> application programs or related master files, which can, in the 
> general
> case,
> be different.

Well, RFC 1035 *does* say that it is in ASCII, whether we like that or 
not. An application could choose to encode the presentation format using 
a different encoding, but that's outside the scope of the protocol.

--Paul Hoffman