Message for Bind-users

[Kevin Darcy]

flaps at dgp.toronto.edu wrote:

> Johnny Fribert Lauridsen <jlaurids at cisco.com> writes:
> >In this country (Denmark), companies and people _want_ to use national characters.
> >Like in Denmark - The O-slash, the A-overcircle and others,
>
> I think that this is completely different than underscores.  The reason I
> think that it is different is that I think that ø and å are useful and
> underscores are useless.  Completely different.  Ø and å form words;
> underscore duplicates what we already use hyphens for.

That's your viewpoint. But many find underscore to be a useful complement or
alternative to hyphen, which tends to be slightly overloaded semantically (signifying
subtraction, among other things). And as for what's strictly "necessary", obviously we
can get by without non-ASCII characters, since we have for many years. We could get by
with 1's and 0's, as I said in an earlier post. That misses the point. We should not
be asking "what's the bare minimum character set with which we can still
function?" but rather "what's the bare minimum of character set *restrictions* we
should impose for reasons of security, etc.?".

Naming services and the protocols which apply to them, exist to serve humans, *not*
the other way around. For maximum freedom of expression, a character should be
considered legal unless there is some reasonable justification for banning it. "It's
not strictly necessary", _ipso_facto_ is not a sufficient justification for a ban.


- Kevin