microsoft claims

[David R. Conrad]

Hi,

> > > > 3. bind does not support utf-8 character encoding.
> > This is false.
>Is it legal to use utf-8 ? Seperate from is it supported or not.

Well, I don't think the police will hunt you down should you put a UTF-8 
string in your domain name server... :-)

More seriously, RFCs 952 and 1123 define that a "hostname" should consist 
only of A-Z, 0-9, and "-".  Clearly, most UTF-8 values violate this 
definition.  However, a domain name can consist of any value and there is 
_very_ strong pressure (particularly out of Asia) to internationalization 
of the DNS.  One of the approaches is to use the approach Microsoft has 
taken, namely simply putting UTF-8 on the wire.  Unfortunately, this 
approach has several flaws:

a) it breaks software (like MTAs, MUAs, etc.) that "knows" host names can 
only be A-Z, 0-9, and "-", sometimes in particularly unpleasant ways.
b) as it is variably multi-byte, the use of UTF-8 can significantly limit 
the number of glyphs one can use in a name for some languages
c) Microsoft did it, therefore it must be inherently evil (well, not 
really, but that seems to be the impression I get from the IETF sometimes)

Another twist is that there are many known bugs in UTF-8 implementations 
(Microsoft's encoding and decoding in particular) that make trying to 
figure out what a UTF-8 value is supposed to be a bit "challenging".

On the other hand, using UTF-8 works (most of the time) with modern 
browsers, so people can make use of UTF-8 strings in the DNS today.

However, in the context of the original post, even the folks in Microsoft 
who wrote their DNS software have publicly stated at the Pittsburgh IETF 
that they consider their approach of "just send UTF-8" a bad idea, so I 
find it a bit weird that they are claiming this is a good thing.  Marketing 
!= Reality, I guess...

Rgds,
-drc