Re: [weirds] Basis for BOF request for Taipei

[Frank Ellermann <[e-mail]>]

On 29 September 2011 18:19, John Levine wrote:

>  1.  Complete support for internationalization of queries and
>    responses, including a standard representation for IDNs and
>    non-ASCII text in queries and responses, and ways to indicate
>    language preferences for responses.

> It seems to me that the likely outcome there is use UTF-8
> everywhere, give or take some rules about when to use U-labels
> or A-labels.

Folks wanting "language negotiation" should use a Web interface,
HTTP supports this.  For WHOIS it would be an obscure hack, e.g.,
"add /e when talking with JPNIC, add -Tdn,ace when talking with
 DENIC, do something when talking with RIPE," etc. ad nauseam.

This just does not scale for the thousands of gTLDs presumably
starting next year.  Otherwise WHOIS i18n is as you said very
simple, just use NET UTF-8 (= RFC 5198), and let the servers
automatically handle A/U-label in queries and offer both forms
in responses.

IMO a WG Charter only needs a pointer to RFC 5198 wrt i18n, all
technical details are then almost obvious.

And the most convoluted i18n interface doesn't help me to get a
technical contact for say domain arbeitssocke.de abused in some
Amazon phishing if the response is like this:

% Error: 55000000002 Connection refused; access control limit exceeded

Needless to say that this was my first query today (= "this IP"),
and manually using the alternative Web interface with a captcha
and some "EULA" is excessively hostile to legit users.

-Frank