Fwd: "International Domain Names" support in KDE

[Thiago Macieira]

Marc Mutz wrote:
>On Monday 27 January 2003 00:43, Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> % ~1/test www.fuß.de
>> www.fuss.de = www.fuss.de
>
>Just make sure you expose the encoding, decoding and normalization or
>else KMail will have to re-invent the wheel, since it looks as though
>punycode will be the encoding for local-part and domain of
>email-addresses.

The documents are actually very specific about this: IDN changes ONLY the 
hostname part of the records. The mail account, for instance, is not changed 
at all and the RFCs still state that it's restricted to US-ASCII.

What they don't say is how you should handle them outside of DNS. What comes 
to mind is what I've just written in the other e-mail (further below down the 
thread): switch to the normalised form at every user input and use that 
Unicode form. I.e., the user types in the browser www.fußball.de and 
Konqueror automatically changes that into www.fussball.de. Same with 
micro/mu, uppercase/lowercase, Turkish i's (all are changed to lowercase 
dotted i), monetary symbol for the Peseta (converted to letters pta),™ into 
tm, etc. Only when needed should the conversion to 8-bit or ASCII be done.

In the case of e-mail, the domain name found in the headers of the message, my 
guess is it should be encoded like subjects or like names (not e-mail 
addresses) are currently done. Only the SMTP conversation will require ACE, 
and that is if ESMTP doesn't specify later on that UTF-8 is to be used.

Every application that transforms a hostname from its internal Unicode 
representation into 8 bits has to evaluate whether to use UTF-8 or ACE.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira - UFOT Registry number: 1001
 thiagom at mail.com
   ICQ UIN: 1967141  PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358
     Registered Linux user #65028
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