Re: rather than argue and bicker about who said what...

["Charles Lindsey" <[e-mail]>]

In <[e-mail]> Russ Allbery <[e-mail]> writes:

>Keith Moore <[e-mail]> writes:

>> it would be interesting to know what the problems are, especially since
>> IDNA or something close to it seems likely to be used in email
>> addresses.

>I'm not at all sure that I agree with Charles's blithe assertions about
>the opinion of USEFOR, but the one objection that was raised to IDNA is
>that it has some potentially somewhat unfortunate side effects when it
>comes to Usenet feed patterns.  Right now, it's common to attempt to
>exclude certain types of binaries with patterns like @*mp3* and @*dvd*; so
>long as all newsgroup names are ASCII words, this works fairly well, but
>once you start using an encoding like IDNA, the chances of odd false
>positives and negatives is quite high.

That is actually a very good point. There is an expectation, built into
NNTP, that users will be able to filter newsgroup-names using "wildmats"
(which are a restricted form of regular expression). The draft of the new
NNTP standard (draft-ietf-nntpext-base-15.txt) goes to considerable
trouble to define wildmats in such a way that they will work with UTF-8.

But for sure they would not work with anything encoded using punycode.

Indeed, that may turn out to be a problem with anyone who wants to filter
out domains of the form "*.æøå.com" from his incoming emails.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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