Network Working Group J. Klensin
Internet-Draft June 18, 2009
Intended status: Informational
Expires: December 20, 2009
Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Background,
Explanation, and Rationale
draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale-10.txt
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Abstract
Several years have passed since the original protocol for
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) was completed and deployed.
During that time, a number of issues have arisen, including the need
to update the system to deal with newer versions of Unicode. Some of
these issues require tuning of the existing protocols and the tables
on which they depend. This document provides an overview of a
revised system and provides explanatory material for its components.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1. Context and Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2. Discussion Forum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3. Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3.1. Documents and Standards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3.2. DNS "Name" Terminology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3.3. New Terminology and Restrictions . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.4. Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.5. Applicability and Function of IDNA . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.6. Comprehensibility of IDNA Mechanisms and Processing . . . 8
2. Processing in IDNA2008 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3. Permitted Characters: An Inclusion List . . . . . . . . . . . 9
3.1. A Tiered Model of Permitted Characters and Labels . . . . 10
3.1.1. PROTOCOL-VALID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
3.1.2. CONTEXTUAL RULE REQUIRED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
3.1.2.2. Rules and Their Application . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.1.3. DISALLOWED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
3.1.4. UNASSIGNED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2. Registration Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3. Layered Restrictions: Tables, Context, Registration,
Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4. Issues that Constrain Possible Solutions . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4.1. Display and Network Order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
4.2. Entry and Display in Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
4.3. Linguistic Expectations: Ligatures, Digraphs, and
Alternate Character Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4.4. Case Mapping and Related Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
4.5. Right to Left Text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
5. IDNs and the Robustness Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
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6. Front-end and User Interface Processing for Lookup . . . . . . 20
7. Migration from IDNA2003 and Unicode Version Synchronization . 24
7.1. Design Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
7.1.1. Summary and Discussion of IDNA Validity Criteria . . . 24
7.1.2. Labels in Registration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
7.1.3. Labels in Lookup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
7.2. Changes in Character Interpretations . . . . . . . . . . . 27
7.3. More Flexibility in User Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
7.4. The Question of Prefix Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
7.4.1. Conditions Requiring a Prefix Change . . . . . . . . . 30
7.4.2. Conditions Not Requiring a Prefix Change . . . . . . . 31
7.4.3. Implications of Prefix Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7.5. Stringprep Changes and Compatibility . . . . . . . . . . . 31
7.6. The Symbol Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
7.7. Migration Between Unicode Versions: Unassigned Code
Points . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
7.8. Other Compatibility Issues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8. Name Server Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
8.1. Processing Non-ASCII Strings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
8.2. DNSSEC Authentication of IDN Domain Names . . . . . . . . 36
8.3. Root and other DNS Server Considerations . . . . . . . . . 37
9. Internationalization Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
10. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
10.1. IDNA Character Registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
10.2. IDNA Context Registry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
10.3. IANA Repository of IDN Practices of TLDs . . . . . . . . . 38
11. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
11.1. General Security Issues with IDNA . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
12. Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
13. Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
14. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
14.1. Normative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
14.2. Informative References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Appendix A. Change Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
A.1. Changes between Version -00 and Version -01 of
draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
A.2. Version -02 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A.3. Version -03 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A.4. Version -04 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
A.5. Version -05 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
A.6. Version -06 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
A.7. Version -07 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
A.8. Version -08 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
A.9. Version -09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
A.10. Version -10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
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1. Introduction
1.1. Context and Overview
Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a collection
of standards that allow client applications to convert some Unicode
mnemonics to an ASCII-compatible encoding form ("ACE") which is a
valid DNS label containing only letters, digits, and hyphens. The
specific form of ACE label used by IDNA is called an "A-label". A
client can look up an exact A-label in the existing DNS, so A-labels
do not require any extensions to DNS, upgrades of DNS servers or
updates to low-level client libraries. An A-label is recognizable
from the prefix "xn--" before the characters produced by the Punycode
algorithm [RFC3492], thus a user application can identify an A-label
and convert it into Unicode (or some local coded character set) for
display.
[[anchor3: Note in draft: The above discussion, and the rest of the
text in this section, are very informal. In particular, the term
"A-label" is used to refer to some things that don't meet all of the
tests for A-labels. I have tightened it somewhat from the suggested
text I received, but not very much. Is the current form ok with
everyone???]]
On the registry side, IDNA allows a registry to offer
Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) for registration as A-labels.
A registry may offer any subset of valid IDNs, and may apply any
restrictions or bundling (grouping of similar labels together in one
registration) appropriate for the context of that registry.
Registration of labels is sometimes discussed separately from lookup,
and is subject to a few specific requirements that do not apply to
lookup.
DNS clients and registries are subject to some differences in
requirements for handling IDNs. In particular, registries are urged
to register only exact, valid A-labels, while clients might do some
mapping to get from otherwise-invalid user input to a valid A-label.
The first version of IDNA was published in 2003 and is referred to
here as IDNA2003 to contrast it with the current version, which is
known as IDNA2008. The documents that made up both versions are
listed in Section 1.3.1. The characters that are valid in A-labels
are identified from rules listed in the Tables document
[IDNA2008-Tables], but validity can be derived from the Unicode
properties of those characters with a very few exceptions.
Traditionally, DNS labels are case-insensitive [RFC1034][RFC1035].
That pattern was preserved in IDNA2003, but if case rules are
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enforced from one language, another language sometimes loses the
ability to treat two characters separately. Case-sensitivity is
treated slightly differently in IDNA2008.
IDNA2003 used Unicode version 3.2 only. In order to keep up with new
characters added in new versions of UNICODE, IDNA2008 decouples its
rules from any particular version of UNICODE. Instead, the
attributes of new characters in Unicode determines how and whether
the characters can be used in IDNA labels.
This document provides informational context for IDNA2008, including
terminology, background, and policy discussions.
1.2. Discussion Forum
[[ RFC Editor: please remove this section. ]]
IDNA2008 is being discussed in the IETF "idnabis" Working Group and
on the mailing list idna-update@alvestrand.no
1.3. Terminology
Terminology for IDNA2008 appears in [IDNA2008-Defs]. That document
also contains a roadmap to the IDNA2008 document collection. No
attempt should be made to understand this document without the
definitions and concepts that appear there.
1.3.1. Documents and Standards
This document uses the term "IDNA2003" to refer to the set of
standards published in 2003 to define IDNA: the IDNA base
specification [RFC3490], Nameprep [RFC3491], Punycode [RFC3492], and
Stringprep [RFC3454].
The term "IDNA2008" is used to refer to a new version of IDNA.
IDNA2008 is not dependent on any of the IDNA2003 specifications other
than the one for Punycode encoding. References to "these
specifications" or "these documents" are to the entire IDNA2008 set
listed in [IDNA2008-Defs].
1.3.2. DNS "Name" Terminology
In the context of IDNs, the DNS term 'name' has introduced some
confusion as people speak of DNS labels in terms of the words or
phrases of various natural languages. Historically, many of the
"names" in the DNS have been mnemonics to identify some particular
concept, object, or organization. They are typically rooted in some
language because most people think in language-based ways. But,
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because they are mnemonics, they need not obey the orthographic
conventions of any language: it is not a requirement that it be
possible for them to be "words".
This distinction is important because the reasonable goal of an IDN
effort is not to be able to write the great Klingon (or language of
one's choice) novel in DNS labels but to be able to form a usefully
broad range of mnemonics in ways that are as natural as possible in a
very broad range of scripts.
1.3.3. New Terminology and Restrictions
These documents introduce new terminology, and precise definitions,
for the terms "U-label", "A-Label", LDH-label (to which all valid
pre-IDNA host names conformed), Reserved-LDH-label (R-LDH-label), XN-
label, Fake-A-Label, and Non-Reserved-LDH-label (NR-LDH-label).
In addition, the term "putative label" has been adopted to refer to a
label that may appear to meet certain definitional constraints but
has not yet been sufficiently tested for validity.
These definitions are illustrated in Figure 1 of the Definitions
Document [IDNA2008-Defs]. R-LDH-labels contain "--" in the third and
fourth character from the beginning of the label. In IDNA-aware
applications, only a subset of these reserved labels is permitted to
be used, namely the A-label subset. A-labels are a subset of the
R-LDH-labels that begin with the case-insensitive string "xn--".
Labels that bear this prefix but which are not otherwise valid fall
into the "Fake-A-label" category. The non-reserved labels (NR-LDH-
labels) are implicitly valid since they do not trigger any
resemblance to IDNA-landr NR-LDH-labels.
The creation of the Reserved-LDH category is required for three
reasons:
o to prevent confusion with pre-IDNA coding forms;
o to permit future extensions that would require changing the
prefix, no matter how unlikely those might be (see Section 7.4);
and
o to reduce the opportunities for attacks via the Punycode encoding
algorithm itself.
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1.4. Objectives
These are the main objectives in revising IDNA.
o Use a more recent version of Unicode, and allow IDNA to be
independent of Unicode versions, so that IDNA2008 need not be
update for implementations to adopt codepoints from new Unicode
versions.
o Fix a very small number of code-point categorizations that have
turned out to cause problems in the communities that use those
code-points.
o Reduce the dependency on mapping, in order that the pre-mapped
forms (which are not valid IDNA labels) tend to appear less often
in various contexts, in favor of valid A-labels.
o Fix some details in the bidirectional codepoint handling
algorithms.
1.5. Applicability and Function of IDNA
The IDNA specification solves the problem of extending the repertoire
of characters that can be used in domain names to include a large
subset of the Unicode repertoire.
IDNA does not extend DNS. Instead, the applications (and, by
implication, the users) continue to see an exact-match lookup
service. Either there is a single exactly-matching (subject to the
base DNS requirement of case-insensitive ASCII matching) name or
there is no match. This model has served the existing applications
well, but it requires, with or without internationalized domain
names, that users know the exact spelling of the domain names that
are to be typed into applications such as web browsers and mail user
agents. The introduction of the larger repertoire of characters
potentially makes the set of misspellings larger, especially given
that in some cases the same appearance, for example on a business
card, might visually match several Unicode code points or several
sequences of code points.
The IDNA standard does not require any applications to conform to it,
nor does it retroactively change those applications. An application
can elect to use IDNA in order to support IDN while maintaining
interoperability with existing infrastructure. If an application
wants to use non-ASCII characters in domain names, IDNA is the only
currently-defined option. Adding IDNA support to an existing
application entails changes to the application only, and leaves room
for flexibility in front-end processing and more specifically in the
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user interface (see Section 6).
A great deal of the discussion of IDN solutions has focused on
transition issues and how IDNs will work in a world where not all of
the components have been updated. Proposals that were not chosen by
the original IDN Working Group would have depended on updating of
user applications, DNS resolvers, and DNS servers in order for a user
to apply an internationalized domain name in any form or coding
acceptable under that method. While processing must be performed
prior to or after access to the DNS, IDNA requires no changes to the
DNS protocol or any DNS servers or the resolvers on user's computers.
IDNA allows the graceful introduction of IDNs not only by avoiding
upgrades to existing infrastructure (such as DNS servers and mail
transport agents), but also by allowing some rudimentary use of IDNs
in applications by using the ASCII-encoded representation of the
labels containing non-ASCII characters. While such names are user-
unfriendly to read and type, and hence not optimal for user input,
they can be used as a last resort to allow rudimentary IDN usage.
For example, they might be the best choice for display if it were
known that relevant fonts were not available on the user's computer.
In order to allow user-friendly input and output of the IDNs and
acceptance of some characters as equivalent to those to be processed
according to the protocol, the applications need to be modified to
conform to this specification.
This version of IDNA uses the Unicode character repertoire, for
continuity with the original version of IDNA.
1.6. Comprehensibility of IDNA Mechanisms and Processing
One goal of IDNA2008, which is aided by the main goal of reducing the
dependency on mapping, is to improve the general understanding of how
to users and registrants are important design goals for this effort.
End-user applications have an important role to play in increasing
this comprehensibility.
Any system that tries to handle international characters encounters
some common problems. For example, a UI cannot display a character
if no font for that character is available. In some cases,
internationalization enables effective localization while maintaining
some global uniformity but losing some universality.
It is difficult to even make suggestions for end-user applications to
cope when characters and fonts are not available. Because display
functions are rarely controlled by the types of applications that
would call upon IDNA, such suggestions will rarely be very effective.
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Converting between local character sets and normalized Unicode, if
needed, is part of this set of user agent issues. This conversion
introduces complexity in a system that is not Unicode-native. If a
label is converted to a local character set that does not have all
the needed characters, the user agent may have to add special logic
to avoid or reduce loss of information.
The major difficulty may lie in accurately identifying the incoming
character set and applying the correct conversion routine. Even more
difficult, the local character coding system could be based on
conceptually different assumptions than those used by Unicode (e.g.,
choice of font encodings used for publications in some Indic
scripts). Those differences may not easily yield unambiguous
conversions or interpretations even if each coding system is
internally consistent and adequate to represent the local language
and script.
IDNA2008 shifts responsibility for character mapping and other
adjustments from the protocol (where it was located in IDNA2003) to
pre-processing before invoking IDNA. The intent is that this change
leads to greater usage of fully-valid A-Labels in display, transit
and storage, which should aid comprehensibility. A careful look at
pre-processing raises issues about what that pre-processing should do
and at what point pre-processing becomes harmful, how universally
consistent pre-processing algorithms can be, and how to be compatible
with labels prepared in a IDNA2003 context. Those issues are
discussed in Section 6. [[anchor9: Fix section reference.]]
2. Processing in IDNA2008
These specifications separate Domain Name Registration and Lookup in
the protocol specification. This separation reflects current
practice in which per-registry restrictions and special processing
are applied at registration time but not during lookup. Another
significant benefit is that separation facilitates incremental
addition of permitted character groups to avoid freezing on one
particular version of Unicode.
The actual registration and lookup protocols for IDNA2008 are
specified in [IDNA2008-Protocol].
3. Permitted Characters: An Inclusion List
IDNA2008 adopts the inclusion model. A code-point is assumed to be
invalid, unless it is included as part of a Unicode property-based
rule or in rare cases included individually by an exception. When an
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implementation moves to a new version of Unicode, the rules may
indicate new valid code-points.
This section provides an overview of the model used to establish the
algorithm and character lists of [IDNA2008-Tables] and describes the
names and applicability of the categories used there. Note that the
inclusion of a character in the first category group (Section 3.1.1)
does not imply that it can be used indiscriminately; some characters
are associated with contextual rules that must be applied as well.
The information given in this section is provided to make the rules,
tables, and protocol easier to understand. The normative generating
rules that correspond to this informal discussion appear in
[IDNA2008-Tables] and the rules that actually determine what labels
can be registered or looked up are in [IDNA2008-Protocol].
3.1. A Tiered Model of Permitted Characters and Labels
Moving to an inclusion model involves a new specification for the
list of characters that are permitted in IDNs. In IDNA2003,
character validity is independent of context and fixed forever (or
until the standard is replaced). However, globally context-
independent rules have proved to be impractical because some
characters, especially those that are called "Join_Controls" in
Unicode, are needed to make reasonable use of some scripts but have
no visible effect in others. IDNA2003 prohibited those types of
characters entirely by discarding them. We now have a consensus that
under some conditions, these "joiner" characters are legitimately
needed to allow useful mnemonics for some languages and scripts. In
general, context-dependent rules help deal with characters that are
used differently across different scripts, and allow the standard to
be applied more appropriately in cases where a string is not
universally handled the same way.
IDNA2008 divides all possible Unicode code-points into four
categories: PROTOCOL-VALID, CONTEXTUAL RULE REQUIRED, DISALLOWED and
UNASSIGNED.
3.1.1. PROTOCOL-VALID
Characters identified as "PROTOCOL-VALID" (often abbreviated
"PVALID") are permitted in IDNs. Their use may be restricted by
rules about the context in which they appear or by other rules that
apply to the entire label in which they are to be embedded. For
example, any label that contains a character in this category that
has a "right-to-left" property must be used in context with the
"Bidi" rules (see [IDNA2008-Bidi]).
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The term "PROTOCOL-VALID" is used to stress the fact that the
presence of a character in this category does not imply that a given
registry need accept registrations containing any of the characters
in the category. Registries are still expected to apply judgment
about labels they will accept and to maintain rules consistent with
those judgments (see [IDNA2008-Protocol] and Section 3.3).
Characters that are placed in the "PROTOCOL-VALID" category are
expected to never be removed from it or reclassified. While
theoretically characters could be removed from Unicode, such removal
would be inconsistent with the Unicode stability principles (see
[Unicode51], Appendix F) and hence should never occur.
3.1.2. CONTEXTUAL RULE REQUIRED
Some characters may be unsuitable for general use in IDNs but
necessary for the plausible support of some scripts. The two most
commonly-cited examples are the zero-width joiner and non-joiner
characters (ZWJ, U+200D and ZWNJ, U+200C).
3.1.2.1. Contextual Restrictions
Characters with contextual restrictions are identified as "CONTEXTUAL
RULE REQUIRED" and associated with a rule. The rule defines whether
the character is valid in a particular string, and also whether the
rule itself is to be applied on lookup as well as registration.
A distinction is made between characters that indicate or prohibit
joining and ones similar to them (known as "CONTEXT-JOINER" or
"CONTEXTJ") and other characters requiring contextual treatment
("CONTEXT-OTHER" or "CONTEXTO"). Only the former require full
testing at lookup time.
It is important to note that these contextual rules cannot prevent
all uses of the relevant characters that might be confusing or
problematic. What they are expected do is to confine applicability
of the characters to scripts (and narrower contexts) where zone
administrators are knowledgeable enough about the use of those
characters to be prepared to deal with them appropriately. For
example, a registry dealing with an Indic script that requires ZWJ
and/or ZWNJ as part of the writing system is expected to understand
where the characters have visible effect and where they do not and to
make registration rules accordingly. By contrast, a registry dealing
with Latin or Cyrillic script might not be actively aware that the
characters exist, much less about the consequences of embedding them
in labels drawn from those scripts.
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3.1.2.2. Rules and Their Application
Rules have descriptions such as "Must follow a character from Script
XYZ", "Must occur only if the entire label is in Script ABC", or
"Must occur only if the previous and subsequent characters have the
DFG property". The actual rules may be DEFINED or NULL. If present,
they may have values of "True" (character may be used in any position
in any label), "False" (character may not be used in any label), or
may be a set of procedural rules that specify the context in which
the character is permitted.
Examples of descriptions of typical rules, stated informally and in
English, include "Must follow a character from Script XYZ", "Must
occur only if the entire label is in Script ABC", "Must occur only if
the previous and subsequent characters have the DFG property".
Because it is easier to identify these characters than to know that
they are actually needed in IDNs or how to establish exactly the
right rules for each one, a rule may have a null value in a given
version of the tables. Characters associated with null rules are not
permitted to appear in putative labels for either registration or
lookup. Of course, a later version of the tables might contain a
non-null rule.
The actual rules and their descriptions are in [IDNA2008-Tables].
[[anchor12: ??? Section number would be good here.]] That document
also creates a registry for future rules.
3.1.3. DISALLOWED
Some characters are inappropriate for use in IDNs and are thus
excluded for both registration and lookup (i.e., IDNA-conforming
applications performing name lookup should verify that these
characters are absent; if they are present, the label strings should
be rejected rather than converted to A-labels and looked up. Some of
these characters are problematic for use in IDNs (such as the
FRACTION SLASH character, U+2044), while some of them (such as the
various HEART symbols, e.g., U+2665, U+2661, and U+2765, see
Section 7.6) simply fall outside the conventions for typical
identifiers (basically letters and numbers).
Of course, this category would include code points that had been
removed entirely from Unicode should such removals ever occur.
Characters that are placed in the "DISALLOWED" category are expected
to never be removed from it or reclassified. If a character is
classified as "DISALLOWED" in error and the error is sufficiently
problematic, the only recourse would be either to introduce a new
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code point into Unicode and classify it as "PROTOCOL-VALID" or for
the IETF to accept the considerable costs of an incompatible change
and replace the relevant RFC with one containing appropriate
exceptions.
There is provision for exception cases but, in general, characters
are placed into "DISALLOWED" if they fall into one or more of the
following groups:
o The character is a compatibility equivalent for another character.
In slightly more precise Unicode terms, application of
normalization method NFKC to the character yields some other
character.
o The character is an upper-case form or some other form that is
mapped to another character by Unicode casefolding.
o The character is a symbol or punctuation form or, more generally,
something that is not a letter, digit, or a mark that is used to
form a letter or digit.
3.1.4. UNASSIGNED
For convenience in processing and table-building, code points that do
not have assigned values in a given version of Unicode are treated as
belonging to a special UNASSIGNED category. Such code points are
prohibited in labels to be registered or looked up. The category
differs from DISALLOWED in that code points are moved out of it by
the simple expedient of being assigned in a later version of Unicode
(at which point, they are classified into one of the other categories
as appropriate).
The rationale for restricting the processing of UNASSIGNED characters
is simply that if such characters were permitted to be looked up, for
example, and were later assigned, but subject to some set of
contextual rules, un-updated instances of IDNA-aware software might
permit lookup of labels containing the previously-unassigned
characters while updated versions of IDNA-aware software might
restrict their use in lookup, depending on the contextual rules. It
should be clear that under no circumstance should an UNASSIGNED
character be permitted in a label to be registered as part of a
domain name.
3.2. Registration Policy
While these recommendations cannot and should not define registry
policies, registries should develop and apply additional restrictions
as needed to reduce confusion and other problems. For example, it is
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generally believed that labels containing characters from more than
one script are a bad practice although there may be some important
exceptions to that principle. Some registries may choose to restrict
registrations to characters drawn from a very small number of
scripts. For many scripts, the use of variant techniques such as
those as described in RFC 3843 [RFC3743] and RFC 4290 [RFC4290], and
illustrated for Chinese by the tables described in RFC 4713 [RFC4713]
may be helpful in reducing problems that might be perceived by users.
In general, users will benefit if registries only permit characters
from scripts that are well-understood by the registry or its
advisers. If a registry decides to reduce opportunities for
confusion by constructing policies that disallow characters used in
historic writing systems or characters whose use is restricted to
specialized, highly technical contexts, some relevant information may
be found in Section 2.4 "Specific Character Adjustments", Table 4
"Candidate Characters for Exclusion from Identifiers" of
[Unicode-UAX31] and Section 3.1. "General Security Profile for
Identifiers" in [Unicode-Security].
It is worth stressing that these principles of policy development and
application apply at all levels of the DNS, not only, e.g., TLD or
SLD registrations and that even a trivial, "anything permitted that
is valid under the protocol" policy is helpful in that it helps users
and application developers know what to expect.
3.3. Layered Restrictions: Tables, Context, Registration, Applications
The character rules in IDNA2008 are based on the realization that
there is no single magic bullet for any of the issues associated with
IDNs. Instead, the specifications define a variety of approaches.
The character tables are the first mechanism, protocol rules about
how those characters are applied or restricted in context are the
second, and those two in combination constitute the limits of what
can be done in the protocol. As discussed in the previous section
(Section 3.2), registries are expected to restrict what they permit
to be registered, devising and using rules that are designed to
optimize the balance between confusion and risk on the one hand and
maximum expressiveness in mnemonics on the other.
In addition, there is an important role for user agents in warning
against label forms that appear problematic given their knowledge of
local contexts and conventions. Of course, no approach based on
naming or identifiers alone can protect against all threats.
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4. Issues that Constrain Possible Solutions
4.1. Display and Network Order
Domain names are always transmitted in network order (the order in
which the code points are sent in protocols), but may have a
different display order (the order in which the code points are
displayed on a screen or paper). When a domain name contains
characters that are normally written right to left, display order may
be affected although network order is not. It gets even more
complicated if left to right and right to left labels are adjacent to
each other within a domain name. The decision about the display
order is ultimately under the control of user agents --including Web
browsers, mail clients, hosted Web applications and many more --
which may be highly localized. Should a domain name abc.def, in
which both labels are represented in scripts that are written right
to left, be displayed as fed.cba or cba.fed? Applications that are
in deployment today are already diverse, and one can find examples of
either choice.
The picture changes once again when an IDN appears in a
Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) [RFC3987]. An IRI or
Internationalized Email address contains elements other than the
domain name. For example, IRIs contain protocol identifiers and
field delimiter syntax such as "http://" or "mailto:" while email
addresses contain the "@" to separate local parts from domain names.
An IRI in network order begins with "http://" followed by domain
labels in network order, thus "http://abc.def".
User agents are not required to display and allow input of IRIs
directly but often do so. Implementors have to choose whether the
overall direction of these strings will always be left to right (or
right to left) for an IRI or email address. The natural order for a
user typing a domain name on a right to left system is fed.cba.
Should the R2L user agent reverse the entire domain name each time a
domain name is typed? Does this change if the user types "http://"
right before typing a domain name, thus implying that the user is
beginning at the beginning of the network order IRI? Experience in
the 1980s and 1990s with mixing systems in which domain name labels
were read in network order (left to right) and those in which those
labels were read right to left would predict a great deal of
confusion.
If each implementation of each application makes its own decisions on
these issues, users will develop heuristics that will sometimes fail
when switching applications. However, while some display order
conventions, voluntarily adopted, would be desirable to reduce
confusion, such suggestions are beyond the scope of these
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specifications.
4.2. Entry and Display in Applications
Applications can accept and display domain names using any character
set or character coding system. That is, the IDNA protocol does not
necessarily affect the interface between users and applications. An
IDNA-aware application can accept and display internationalized
domain names in two formats: the internationalized character set(s)
supported by the application (i.e., an appropriate local
representation of a U-label), and as an A-label. Applications may
allow the display of A-labels, but are encouraged to not do so except
as an interface for special purposes, possibly for debugging, or to
cope with display limitations. In general, they should allow, but
not encourage, user input of A-labels. A-labels are opaque and ugly
and malicious variations on them are not easily detected by users.
Where possible, they should thus only be exposed when they are
absolutely needed. Because IDN labels can be rendered either as
A-labels or U-labels, the application may reasonably have an option
for the user to select the preferred method of display. Rendering
the U-label should normally be the default.
Domain names are often stored and transported in many places. For
example, they are part of documents such as mail messages and web
pages. They are transported in many parts of many protocols, such as
both the control commands of SMTP and associated the message body
parts, and in the headers and the body content in HTTP. It is
important to remember that domain names appear both in domain name
slots and in the content that is passed over protocols.
In protocols and document formats that define how to handle
specification or negotiation of charsets, labels can be encoded in
any charset allowed by the protocol or document format. If a
protocol or document format only allows one charset, the labels must
be given in that charset. Of course, not all charsets can properly
represent all labels. If a U-label cannot be displayed in its
entirety, the only choice (without loss of information) may be to
display the A-label.
Where a protocol or document format allows IDNs, labels should be in
whatever character encoding and escape mechanism the protocol or
document format uses at that place. This provision is intended to
prevent situations in which, e.g., UTF-8 domain names appear embedded
in text that is otherwise in some other character coding.
All protocols that use domain name slots (See Section 2.3.1.6
[[anchor15: ?? Verify this]] in [IDNA2008-Defs]) already have the
capacity for handling domain names in the ASCII charset. Thus,
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A-labels can inherently be handled by those protocols.
4.3. Linguistic Expectations: Ligatures, Digraphs, and Alternate
Character Forms
Users have expectations about character matching or equivalence that
are based on their own languages and the orthography of those
languages. These expectations may not always be met in a global
system, especially if multiple languages are written using the same
script but using different conventions. Some examples:
o A Norwegian user might expect a label with the ae-ligature to be
treated as the same label as one using the Swedish spelling with
a-diaeresis even though applying that mapping to English would be
astonishing to users.
o A user in German might expect a label with an o-umlaut and a label
that had "oe" substituted, but was otherwise the same, treated as
equivalent even though that substitution would be a clear error in
Swedish.
o A Chinese user might expect automatic matching of Simplified and
Traditional Chinese characters, but applying that matching for
Korean or Japanese text would create considerable confusion.
o An English user might expect "theater" and "theatre" to match.
A number of languages use alphabetic scripts in which single phonemes
are written using two characters, termed a "digraph", for example,
the "ph" in "pharmacy" and "telephone". (Such characters can also
appear consecutively without forming a digraph, as in "tophat".)
Certain digraphs may be indicated typographically by setting the two
characters closer together than they would be if used consecutively
to represent different phonemes. Some digraphs are fully joined as
ligatures. For example, the word "encyclopaedia" is sometimes set
with a U+00E6 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE AE. When ligature and digraph
forms have the same interpretation across all languages that use a
given script, application of Unicode normalization generally resolves
the differences and causes them to match. When they have different
interpretations, matching must utilize other methods, presumably
chosen at the registry completely optional typographic convenience
for representing a digraph in one language (as in the above example
with some spelling conventions), while in another language it is a
single character that may not always be correctly representable by a
two-letter sequence (as in the above example with different spelling
conventions). This can be illustrated by many words in the Norwegian
language, where the "ae" ligature is the 27th letter of a 29-letter
extended Latin alphabet. It is equivalent to the 28th letter of the
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Swedish alphabet (also containing 29 letters), U+00E4 LATIN SMALL
LETTER A WITH DIAERESIS, for which an "ae" cannot be substituted
according to current orthographic standards.
That character (U+00E4) is also part of the German alphabet where,
unlike in the Nordic languages, the two-character sequence "ae" is
usually treated as a fully acceptable alternate orthography for the
"umlauted a" character. The inverse is however not true, and those
two characters cannot necessarily be combined into an "umlauted a".
This also applies to another German character, the "umlauted o"
(U+00F6 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS) which, for example,
cannot be used for writing the name of the author "Goethe". It is
also a letter in the Swedish alphabet where, like the "a with
diaeresis", it cannot be correctly represented as "oe" and in the
Norwegian alphabet, where it is represented, not as "o with
diaeresis", but as "slashed o", U+00F8.
Some of the ligatures that have explicit code points in Unicode were
given special handling in IDNA2003 and now pose additional problems
in transition. See Section 7.2.
Additional cases with alphabets written right to left are described
in Section 4.5.
Matching and comparison algorithm selection often requires
information about the language being used, context, or both --
information that is not available to IDNA or the DNS. Consequently,
these specifications make no attempt to treat combined characters in
any special way. A registry that is aware of the language context in
which labels are to be registered, and where that language sometimes
(or always) treats the two- character sequences as equivalent to the
combined form, should give serious consideration to applying a
"variant" model [RFC3743] [RFC4290], or to prohibiting registration
of one the forms entirely, to reduce the opportunities for user
confusion and fraud that would result from the related strings being
registered to different parties.
[[anchor16: Placeholder: A discussion of the Arabic digit issue
should go here once it is resolved in some appropriate way.]]
4.4. Case Mapping and Related Issues
In the DNS, ASCII letters are stored with their case preserved.
Matching during the query process is case-independent, but none of
the information that might be represented by choices of case has been
lost. That model has been accidentally helpful because, as people
have created DNS labels by catenating words (or parts of words) to
form labels, case has often been used to distinguish among components
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and make the labels more memorable.
Since DNS servers do not get involved in parsing IDNs, they cannot do
case-independent matching. Thus, keeping the cases separate in
lookup or registration, and doing matching at the server, is not
feasible with IDNA or any similar approach. Case-matching must be
done, if desired, by IDN clients even though it wasn't done by ASCII-
only DNS clients. That situation was recognized in IDNA2003 and
nothing in these specifications fundamentally changes it or could do
so. In IDNA2003, all characters are case-folded and mapped by
clients in a standardized step.
Some characters do not have upper case forms. For example the
Unicode case folding operation maps Greek Final Form Sigma (U+03C2)
to the medial form (U+03C3) and maps Eszett (German Sharp S, U+00DF)
to "ss". Neither of these mappings is reversible because the upper
case of U+03C3 is the Upper Case Sigma (U+03A3) and "ss" is an ASCII
string. IDNA2008 permits, at the risk of some incompatibility,
slightly more flexibility in this area by avoid case folding and
treating these characters as themselves. Approaches to handling one-
way mappings are discussed in Section 7.2.
Because IDNA2003 maps Final Sigma and Eszett to other characters, and
the reverse mapping is never possible, that in some sense means that
neither Final Sigma nor Eszett can be represented in a IDNA2003 IDN.
With IDNA2008, both characters can be used in an IDN and so the
A-label used for lookup for any U-label containing those characters,
is now different. See Section 7.1 for a discussion of what kinds of
changes might require the IDNA prefix to change; this case is clearly
worth discussing but the WG came to consensus not to make a prefix
change anyway.
4.5. Right to Left Text
In order to be sure that the directionality of right to left text is
unambiguous, IDNA2003 required that any label in which right to left
characters appear both starts and ends with them and that it not
include any characters with strong left to right properties (that
excludes other alphabetic characters but permits European digits).
Any other string that contains a right to left character and does not
meet those requirements is rejected. This is one of the few places
where the IDNA algorithms (both in IDNA2003 and in IDAN2008) examine
an entire label, not just individual characters. The algorithmic
model used in IDNA2003 rejects the label when the final character in
a right to left string requires a combining mark in order to be
correctly represented.
That prohibition is not acceptable for writing systems for languages
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written with consonantal alphabets to which diacritical vocalic
systems are applied, and for languages with orthographies derived
from them where the combining marks may have different functionality.
In both cases the combining marks can be essential components of the
orthography. Examples of this are Yiddish, written with an extended
Hebrew script, and Dhivehi (the official language of Maldives) which
is written in the Thaana script (which is, in turn, derived from the
Arabic script). IDNA2008 removes the restriction on final combining
characters with a new set of rules for right to left scripts and
their characters. Those new rules are specified in [IDNA2008-Bidi].
5. IDNs and the Robustness Principle
The "Robustness Principle" is often stated as "Be conservative about
what you send and liberal in what you accept" (See, e.g., Section
1.2.2 of the applications-layer Host Requirements specification
[RFC1123]) This principle applies to IDNA. In applying the principle
to registries as the source ("sender") of all registered and useful
IDNs, registries are responsible for being conservative about what
they register and put out in the Internet. For IDNs to work well,
zone administrators (registries) must have and require sensible
policies about what is registered -- conservative policies -- and
implement and enforce them.
Conversely, lookup applications are expected to reject labels that
clearly violate global (protocol) rules (no one has ever seriously
claimed that being liberal in what is accepted requires being
stupid). However, once one gets past such global rules and deals
with anything sensitive to script or locale, it is necessary to
assume that garbage has not been placed into the DNS, i.e., one must
be liberal about what one is willing to look up in the DNS rather
than guessing about whether it should have been permitted to be
registered.
If a string cannot be successfully found in the DNS after the lookup
processing described here, it makes no difference whether it simply
wasn't registered or was prohibited by some rule at the registry.
Application implementors should be aware that where DNS wildcards are
used, the ability to successfully resolve a name does not guarantee
that it was actually registered.
6. Front-end and User Interface Processing for Lookup
[[anchor18: Note in Draft: While this section has been revised in
version -10 to improve clarity, a significant revision is expected
once the discussions of mapping stabilize.]]
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Domain names may be identified and processed in many contexts. They
may be typed in by users either by themselves or embedded in an
identifier such as email addresses, URIs, or IRIs. They may occur in
running text or be processed by one system after being provided in
another. Systems may try to normalize URLs to determine (or guess)
whether a reference is valid or two references point to the same
object without actually looking the objects up (comparison without
lookup is necessary for URI types that are not intended to be
resolved). Some of these goals may be more easily and reliably
satisfied than others. While there are strong arguments for any
domain name that is placed "on the wire" -- transmitted between
systems -- to be in the zero-ambiguity forms of A-labels, it is
inevitable that programs that process domain names will encounter
U-labels or variant forms.
This section discusses these mapping and transformation issues among
names, contrasting IDNA2003 and IDNA2008 behavior. The discussion
applies only in operations that look up names or interpret files.
There are several reasons why registration activities should require
final names and verification of those names by the would-be
registrant.
One source of label forms that are neither A-labels nor U-labels will
be labels created under IDNA2003. That protocol allowed labels that
were transformed from native-character format by mapping some
characters into others before conversion into A-label format. One
consequence of the transformations was that conversion from the
A-label format back to native characters often did not produce the
original label. IDNA2008 explicitly defines A-labels and U-labels as
different forms of the same abstract label, forms that are stable
when conversions are performed between them (without mappings).
A different way of explaining this is that there are, today, domain
names in files on the Internet that use characters that cannot be
represented directly in, or recovered from, (A-label) domain names
but for which interpretations were provided by IDNA2003). There are
two major categories of characters irreversibly remapped by
Stringprep, those that are removed by NFKC normalization and those
upper-case characters that are mapped to lower-case (there are also a
few characters that are given special-case mapping treatment,
including lower-case characters that are case-folded into other
lower-case characters or strings and those that are simply
eliminated).
Other issues in domain name identification and processing arise
because IDNA2003 specified that several other characters be treated
as equivalent to the ASCII period (dot, full stop) character used as
a label separator. If a string that might be a domain name appears
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in an arbitrary context (such as running text), it is difficult, even
with only ASCII characters, to know whether an actual domain name (or
a protocol parameter like a URI) is present and where it starts and
ends. When using Unicode, this gets even more difficult if treatment
of certain special characters (like the dot that separates labels in
a domain name) depends on context (e.g., prior knowledge of whether
the string represents a domain name or not). That knowledge is not
available if the primary heuristic for identifying the presence of
domain names in strings depends on the presence of dots separating
groups of characters with no intervening spaces.
[[anchor19: Placeholder: In serial efforts to move the mapping model
out of the protocol and leave it unspecified here, this paragraph has
become a complete botch. Rewrite when the mapping plan stabilizes.]]
The IDNA2008 model removes all of these mappings and interpretations,
including the equivalence of different forms of dots, from the
protocol, discouraging such mappings and leaving them, when
necessary, to local processing. This should not be taken to imply
that local processing is optional or can be avoided entirely, even if
doing so might have been desirable in a world without IDNA2003 IDNs
in files and archives. Instead, unless the program context is such
that it is known that any IDNs that appear will contain either
U-label or A-label forms, or that other forms can safely be rejected,
some local processing of apparent domain name strings will be
required, both to maintain compatibility with IDNA2003 and to prevent
user astonishment. Such local processing, while not specified in
this document or the associated ones, will generally take one of two
forms:
o Generic Preprocessing.
When the context in which the program or system that processes
domain names operates is global, a reasonable balance must be
found that is sensitive to the broad range of local needs and
assumptions while, at the same time, not sacrificing the needs of
one language, script, or user population to those of another.
For this case, the best practice will usually be to apply NFKC and
case-mapping (or, perhaps better yet, Stringprep itself), plus
dot-mapping where appropriate, to the domain name string prior to
applying IDNA. That practice will not only yield a reasonable
compromise of user experience with protocol requirements but will
be almost completely compatible with the various forms permitted
by IDNA2003.
o Highly Localized Preprocessing.
Unlike the case above, there will be some situations in which
software will be highly localized for a particular environment and
carefully adapted to the expectations of users in that
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environment. The many discussions about using the Internet to
preserve and support local cultures suggest that these cases may
be more common in the future than they have been so far.
In these cases, we should avoid trying to tell implementers what
they should accept, if only because they are quite likely (and for
good reason) to ignore us. We would assume that they would map
characters that the intuitions of their users would suggest be
mapped and would hope that they would do that mapping as early as
possible, storing A-label or U-label forms in files and
transporting only those forms between systems. One can imagine
switches about whether some sorts of mappings occur, warnings
before applying them or, in a slightly more extreme version of the
approach taken in Internet Explorer version 7 (IE7), systems that
utterly refuse to handle "strange" characters at all if they
appear in U-label form. None of those local decisions are a
threat to interoperability as long as (i) only U-labels and
A-labels are used in interchange with systems outside the local
environment, (ii) no character that would be valid in a U-label as
itself is mapped to something else, (iii) any local mappings are
applied as a preprocessing step (or, for conversions from U-labels
or A-labels to presentation forms, postprocessing), not as part of
IDNA processing proper, and (iv) appropriate consideration is
given to labels that might have entered the environment in
conformance to IDNA2003.
In either case, it is vital that user interface designs and, where
the interfaces are not sufficient, users, be aware that the only
forms of domain names that this protocol anticipates will resolve
globally or compare equal when crude methods (i.e., those not
conforming to the strict definition of label equivalence given in
[IDNA2008-Defs]) are used are those in which all native-script labels
are in U-label form. Forms that assume mapping will occur,
especially forms that were not valid under IDNA2003, may or may not
function in predictable ways across all implementations.
User interfaces involving Latin-based scripts should take special
care when considering how to handle case mapping because small
differences in label strings may cause behavior that is astonishing
to users. Because case-insensitive comparison is done for ASCII
strings by DNS-servers, an all-ASCII label is treated as case-
insensitive. However, if even one of the characters of that string
is replaced by one that requires the label to be given IDN treatment
(e.g., by adding a diacritical mark), then the label effectively
becomes case-sensitive because only lower-case characters are
permitted in IDNs. Preprocessing in applications to handle case
mapping for Latin-based scripts (and possibly other scripts with case
distinctions) may be wise to prevent user astonishment. However, all
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applications may not do this and ambiguity in transport is not
desirable. Consequently the case-dependent forms should not be
stored in files.
7. Migration from IDNA2003 and Unicode Version Synchronization
7.1. Design Criteria
As mentioned above and in RFC 4690, two key goals of the IDNA2008
design are
o to enable applications to be agnostic about whether they are being
run in environments supporting any Unicode version from 3.2
onward,
o to permit incrementally adding new characters, character groups,
scripts, and other character collections as they are incorporated
into Unicode, doing so without disruption and, in the long term,
without "heavy" processes (an IETF consensus process is required
by the IDNA2008 specifications and is expected to be required and
used until significant experience accumulates with IDNA operations
and new versions of Unicode).
7.1.1. Summary and Discussion of IDNA Validity Criteria
The general criteria for a label to be considered IDNA-valid are (the
actual rules are rigorously defined in the "Protocol" and "Tables"
documents):
o The characters are "letters", marks needed to form letters,
numerals, or other code points used to write words in some
language. Symbols, drawing characters, and various notational
characters are intended to be permanently excluded. There is no
evidence that they are important enough to Internet operations or
internationalization to justify expansion of domain names beyond
the general principle of "letters, digits, and hyphen".
(Additional discussion and rationale for the symbol decision
appears in Section 7.6).
o Other than in very exceptional cases, e.g., where they are needed
to write substantially any word of a given language, punctuation
characters are excluded. The fact that a word exists is not proof
that it should be usable in a DNS label and DNS labels are not
expected to be usable for multiple-word phrases (although they are
certainly not prohibited if the conventions and orthography of a
particular language cause that to be possible).
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o Characters that are unassigned (have no character assignment at
all) in the version of Unicode being used by the registry or
application are not permitted, even on lookup. The issues
involved in this decision are discussed in Section 7.7.
o Any character that is mapped to another character by a current
version of NFKC is prohibited as input to IDNA (for either
registration or lookup). With a few exceptions, this principle
excludes any character mapped to another by Nameprep [RFC3491].
The principles above drive the design of rules that are specified
exactly in [IDNA2008-Tables]. Those rules identify the characters
that are IDNA-valid. The rules themselves are normative, and the
tables are derived from them, rather than vice versa.
7.1.2. Labels in Registration
Any label registered in a DNS zone must be validated -- i.e., the
criteria for that label must be met -- in order for applications to
work as intended. This principle is not new. For example, since the
DNS was first deployed, zone administrators have been expected to
verify that names meet "hostname" requirements [RFC0952] where those
requirements are imposed by the expected applications. Other
applications contexts, such as the later addition of special service
location formats [RFC2782] imposed new requirements on zone
administrators. For zones that will contain IDNs, support for
Unicode version-independence requires restrictions on all strings
placed in the zone. In particular, for such zones:
o Any label that appears to be an A-label, i.e., any label that
starts in "xn--", must be IDNA-valid, i.e., they must be valid
A-labels, as discussed in Section 2 above.
o The Unicode tables (i.e., tables of code points, character
classes, and properties) and IDNA tables (i.e., tables of
contextual rules such as those that appear in the Tables
document), must be consistent on the systems performing or
validating labels to be registered. Note that this does not
require that tables reflect the latest version of Unicode, only
that all tables used on a given system are consistent with each
other.
Under this model, registry tables will need to be updated (both the
Unicode-associated tables and the tables of permitted IDN characters)
to enable a new script or other set of new characters. The registry
will not be affected by newer versions of Unicode, or newly-
authorized characters, until and unless it wishes to support them.
The zone administrator is responsible for verifying IDNA-validity as
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well as its local policies -- a more extensive set of checks than are
required for looking up the labels. Systems looking up or resolving
DNS labels, especially IDN DNS labels, must be able to assume that
applicable registration rules were followed for names entered into
the DNS.
7.1.3. Labels in Lookup
Anyone looking up a label in a DNS zone is required to
o Maintain IDNA and Unicode tables that are consistent with regard
to versions, i.e., unless the application actually executes the
classification rules in [IDNA2008-Tables], its IDNA tables must be
derived from the version of Unicode that is supported more
generally on the system. As with registration, the tables need
not reflect the latest version of Unicode but they must be
consistent.
o Validate the characters in labels to be looked up only to the
extent of determining that the U-label does not contain
"DISALLOWED" code points or code points that are unassigned in its
version of Unicode.
o Validate the label itself for conformance with a small number of
whole-label rules. In particular, it must verify that
* there are no leading combining marks,
* the "bidi" conditions are met if right to left characters
appear,
* any required contextual rules are available, and
* any contextual rules that are associated with Joiner Controls
are tested.
o Do not reject labels based on other contextual rules about
characters, including mixed-script label prohibitions. Such rules
may be used to influence presentation decisions in the user
interface, but not to avoid looking up domain names.
Lookup applications that following these rules, rather than having
their own criteria for rejecting lookup attempts, are not sensitive
to version incompatibilities with the particular zone registry
associated with the domain name except for labels containing
characters recently added to Unicode.
An application or client that processes names according to this
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protocol and then resolves them in the DNS will be able to locate any
name that is registered, as long as those registrations are IDNA-
value and its version of the IDNA tables is sufficiently up-to-date
to interpret all of the characters in the label. Messages to users
should distinguish between "label contains an unallocated code point"
and other types of lookup failures. A failure on the basis of an old
version of Unicode may lead the user to a desire to upgrade to a
newer version, but will have no other ill effects (this is consistent
with behavior in the transition to the DNS when some hosts could not
yet handle some forms of names or record types).
7.2. Changes in Character Interpretations
[[anchor22: This subsection will need to be rewritten when the
mapping decisions stabilize.]]
In those scripts that make case distinctions, there are a few
characters for which an obvious and unique upper case character has
not historically been available to match a lower case one or vice
versa. For those characters, the mappings used in constructing the
Stringprep tables for IDNA2003, performed using the Unicode CaseFold
operation (See Section 5.8 of the Unicode Standard [Unicode51]),
generate different characters or sets of characters. Those
operations are not reversible and lose even more information than
traditional upper case or lower case transformations, but are more
useful than those transformations for comparison purposes. Two
notable characters of this type are the German character Eszett
(Sharp S, U+00DF) and the Greek Final Form Sigma (U+03C2). The
former is case-folded to the ASCII string "ss", the latter to a
medial (Lower Case) Sigma (U+03C3).
The decision to eliminate mappings, including case folding, from the
IDNA2008 protocol in order to make A-labels and U-labels idempotent
made these characters problematic. If they were to be disallowed,
important words and mnemonics could not be written in
orthographically reasonable ways. If they were to be permitted as
distinct characters, there would be no information loss and
registries would have more flexibility, but IDNA2003 and IDNA2008
lookups might result in different A-labels.
With the understanding that there would be incompatibility either way
but a judgment that the incompatibility was not significant enough to
justify a prefix change, the WG concluded that Eszett and Final Form
Sigma should be treated as distinct and Protocol-Valid characters.
Registries, especially those maintaining zones for third parties,
must decide how to introduce a new service in a way that does not
create confusion or significantly weaken or invalidate existing
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identifiers. This is not a new problem; registries were faced with
similar issues when IDNs were introduced and when other new forms of
strings have been permitted as labels.
There are several approaches to problems of this type. Without any
preference or claim to completeness, some of these, all of which have
been used by registries in the past for similar transitions, are:
o Do not permit use of the newly-available character at the registry
level. This might cause lookup failures if a domain name were to
be written with the expectation of the IDNA2003 mapping behavior,
but would eliminate any possibility of false matches.
o Hold a "sunrise"-like arrangement in which holders of labels
containing "ss" in the Eszett case or Lower Case Sigma are given
priority (and perhaps other benefits) for registering the
corresponding string containing Eszett or Final Sigma
respectively.
o Adopt some sort of "variant" approach in which registrants obtain
labels with both character forms.
o Adopt a different form of "variant" approach in which registration
of additional names is either not permitted at all or permitted
only by the registrant who already has one of the names.
7.3. More Flexibility in User Agents
[[anchor23: Note in Draft: This section is mapping-related and may
need to be revised after that issue settles down.]] Also, it is
closely related to Section 4.2 and may need to be cross-referenced
from it or consolidated into it.
These documents do not specify mappings between one character or code
point and others. Instead, IDNA2008 prohibits characters that would
be mapped to others by normalization, upper case to lower case
changes, or other rules. As examples, while mathematical characters
based on Latin ones are accepted as input to IDNA2003, they are
prohibited in IDNA2008. Similarly, double-width characters and other
variations are prohibited as IDNA input.
Since the rules in [IDNA2008-Tables] have the effect that only
strings that are not transformed by NFKC are valid, if an application
chooses to perform NFKC normalization before lookup, that operation
is safe since this will never make the application unable to look up
any valid string. However, as discussed above, the application
cannot guarantee that any other application will perform that
mapping, so it should be used only with caution and for informed
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users.
In many cases these prohibitions should have no effect on what the
user can type as input to the lookup process. It is perfectly
reasonable for systems that support user interfaces to perform some
character mapping that is appropriate to the local environment. This
would normally be done prior to actual invocation of IDNA. At least
conceptually, the mapping would be part of the Unicode conversions
discussed above and in [IDNA2008-Protocol]. However, those changes
will be local ones only -- local to environments in which users will
clearly understand that the character forms are equivalent. For use
in interchange among systems, it appears to be much more important
that U-labels and A-labels can be mapped back and forth without loss
of information.
One specific, and very important, instance of this strategy arises
with case-folding. In the ASCII-only DNS, names are looked up and
matched in a case-independent way, but no actual case-folding occurs.
Names can be placed in the DNS in either upper or lower case form (or
any mixture of them) and that form is preserved, returned in queries,
and so on. IDNA2003 approximated that behavior for non-ASCII strings
by performing case-folding at registration time (resulting in only
lower-case IDNs in the DNS) and when names were looked up.
As suggested earlier in this section, it appears to be desirable to
do as little character mapping as possible as long as Unicode works
correctly (e.g., NFC mapping to resolve different codings for the
same character is still necessary although the specifications require
that it be performed prior to invoking the protocol) in order to make
the mapping between A-labels and U-labels idempotent. Case-mapping
is not an exception to this principle. If only lower case characters
can be registered in the DNS (i.e., be present in a U-label), then
IDNA2008 should prohibit upper-case characters as input. Some other
considerations reinforce this conclusion. For example, in ASCII
case-mapping for individual characters, uppercase(character) must be
equal to uppercase(lowercase(character)). That may not be true with
IDNs. In some scripts that use case distinctions, there are a few
characters that do not have counterparts in one case or the other.
The relationship between upper case and lower case may even be
language-dependent, with different languages (or even the same
language in different areas) expecting different mappings. User
agents can meet the expectations of users who are accustomed to the
case-insensitive DNS environment by performing case folding prior to
IDNA processing, but the IDNA procedures themselves should neither
require such mapping nor expect them when they are not natural to the
localized environment.
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7.4. The Question of Prefix Changes
The conditions that would require a change in the IDNA ACE prefix
("xn--" for the version of IDNA specified in [RFC3490]) have been a
great concern to the community. A prefix change would clearly be
necessary if the algorithms were modified in a manner that would
create serious ambiguities during subsequent transition in
registrations. This section summarizes our conclusions about the
conditions under which changes in prefix would be necessary and the
implications of such a change.
7.4.1. Conditions Requiring a Prefix Change
An IDN prefix change is needed if a given string would be looked up
or otherwise interpreted differently depending on the version of the
protocol or tables being used. An IDNA upgrade would require a
prefix change if, and only if, one of the following four conditions
were met:
1. The conversion of an A-label to Unicode (i.e., a U-label) yields
one string under IDNA2003 (RFC3490) and a different string under
IDNA2008.
2. In a significant number of cases, an input string that is valid
under IDNA2003 and also valid under IDNA2008 yields two different
A-labels with the different versions. This condition is believed
to be essentially equivalent to the one above except for a very
small number of edge cases which may not justify a prefix change
(See Section 7.2).
Note that if the input string is valid under one version and not
valid under the other, this condition does not apply. See the
first item in Section 7.4.2, below.
3. A fundamental change is made to the semantics of the string that
is inserted in the DNS, e.g., if a decision were made to try to
include language or script information in the encoding in
addition to the string itself.
4. A sufficiently large number of characters is added to Unicode so
that the Punycode mechanism for block offsets can no longer
reference the higher-numbered planes and blocks. This condition
is unlikely even in the long term and certain not to arise in the
next several years.
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7.4.2. Conditions Not Requiring a Prefix Change
As a result of the principles described above, none of the following
changes require a new prefix:
1. Prohibition of some characters as input to IDNA. This may make
names that are now registered inaccessible, but does not change
those names.
2. Adjustments in IDNA tables or actions, including normalization
definitions, that affect characters that were already invalid
under IDNA2003.
3. Changes in the style of the IDNA definition that does not alter
the actions performed by IDNA.
7.4.3. Implications of Prefix Changes
While it might be possible to make a prefix change, the costs of such
a change are considerable. Registries could not convert all IDNA2003
("xn--") registrations to a new form at the same time and synchronize
that change with applications supporting lookup. Unless all existing
registrations were simply to be declared invalid (and perhaps even
then) systems that needed to support both labels with old prefixes
and labels with new ones would first process a putative label under
the IDNA2008 rules and try to look it up and then, if it were not
found, would process the label under IDNA2003 rules and look it up
again. That process could significantly slow down all processing
that involved IDNs in the DNS especially since a fully-qualified name
might contain a mixture of labels that were registered with the old
and new prefixes. That would make DNS caching very difficult. In
addition, looking up the same input string as two separate A-labels
creates some potential for confusion and attacks, since the labels
could map to different targets and then resolve to different entries
in the DNS.
Consequently, a prefix change is to be avoided if at all possible,
even if it means accepting some IDNA2003 decisions about character
distinctions as irreversible and/or giving special treatment to edge
cases.
7.5. Stringprep Changes and Compatibility
The Nameprep [RFC3491] specification, a key part of IDNA2003, is a
profile of Stringprep [RFC3454]. While Nameprep is a Stringprep
profile specific to IDNA, Stringprep is used by a number of other
protocols. Were Stringprep to be modified by IDNA2008, those changes
to improve the handling of IDNs could cause problems for non-DNS
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uses, most notably if they affected identification and authentication
protocols. Several elements of IDNA2008 give interpretations to
strings prohibited under IDNA2003 or prohibit strings that IDNA2003
permitted. Those elements include the proposed new inclusion tables
[IDNA2008-Tables], the reduction in the number of characters
permitted as input for registration or lookup (Section 3), and even
the proposed changes in handling of right to left strings
[IDNA2008-Bidi]. IDNA2008 does not use Nameprep or Stringprep at
all, so there are no side-effect changes to other protocols.
It is particularly important to keep IDNA processing separate from
processing for various security protocols because some of the
constraints that are necessary for smooth and comprehensible use of
IDNs may be unwanted or undesirable in other contexts. For example,
the criteria for good passwords or passphrases are very different
from those for desirable IDNs: passwords should be hard to guess,
while domain names should normally be easily memorable. Similarly,
internationalized SCSI identifiers and other protocol components are
likely to have different requirements than IDNs.
7.6. The Symbol Question
One of the major differences between this specification and the
original version of IDNA is that the original version permitted non-
letter symbols of various sorts, including punctuation and line-
drawing symbols, in the protocol. They were always discouraged in
practice. In particular, both the "IESG Statement" about IDNA and
all versions of the ICANN Guidelines specify that only language
characters be used in labels. This specification disallows symbols
entirely. There are several reasons for this, which include:
1. As discussed elsewhere, the original IDNA specification assumed
that as many Unicode characters as possible should be permitted,
directly or via mapping to other characters, in IDNs. This
specification operates on an inclusion model, extrapolating from
the original "hostname" rules (LDH, see [IDNA2008-Defs]) -- which
have served the Internet very well -- to a Unicode base rather
than an ASCII base.
2. Symbol names are more problematic than letters because there may
be no general agreement on whether a particular glyph matches a
symbol; there are no uniform conventions for naming; variations
such as outline, solid, and shaded forms may or may not exist;
and so on. As just one example, consider a "heart" symbol as it
might appear in a logo that might be read as "I love...". While
the user might read such a logo as "I love..." or "I heart...",
considerable knowledge of the coding distinctions made in Unicode
is needed to know that there more than one "heart" character
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(e.g., U+2665, U+2661, and U+2765) and how to describe it. These
issues are of particular importance if strings are expected to be
understood or transcribed by the listener after being read out
loud.
[[anchor24: The above paragraph remains controversial as to
whether it is valid. The WG will need to make a decision if this
section is not dropped entirely.]]
3. Consider the case of a screen reader used by blind Internet users
who must listen to renderings of IDN domain names and possibly
reproduce them on the keyboard.
4. As a simplified example of this, assume one wanted to use a
"heart" or "star" symbol in a label. This is problematic because
those names are ambiguous in the Unicode system of naming (the
actual Unicode names require far more qualification). A user or
would-be registrant has no way to know -- absent careful study of
the code tables -- whether it is ambiguous (e.g., where there are
multiple "heart" characters) or not. Conversely, the user seeing
the hypothetical label doesn't know whether to read it -- try to
transmit it to a colleague by voice -- as "heart", as "love", as
"black heart", or as any of the other examples below.
5. The actual situation is even worse than this. There is no
possible way for a normal, casual, user to tell the difference
between the hearts of U+2665 and U+2765 and the stars of U+2606
and U+2729 or the without somehow knowing to look for a
distinction. We have a white heart (U+2661) and few black
hearts. Consequently, describing a label as containing a heart
hopelessly ambiguous: we can only know that it contains one of
several characters that look like hearts or have "heart" in their
names. In cities where "Square" is a popular part of a location
name, one might well want to use a square symbol in a label as
well and there are far more squares of various flavors in Unicode
than there are hearts or stars.
The consequence of these ambiguities is that symbols are a very poor
basis for reliable communication. Consistent with this conclusion,
the Unicode standard recommends that strings used in identifiers not
contain symbols or punctuation [Unicode-UAX31]. Of course, these
difficulties with symbols do not arise with actual pictographic
languages and scripts which would be treated like any other language
characters; the two should not be confused.
7.7. Migration Between Unicode Versions: Unassigned Code Points
In IDNA2003, labels containing unassigned code points are looked up
on the assumption that, if they appear in labels and can be mapped
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and then resolved, the relevant standards must have changed and the
registry has properly allocated only assigned values.
In the protocol described in these documents, strings containing
unassigned code points must not be either looked up or registered.
In summary, the status of an unassigned character with regard to the
DISALLOWED, PROTOCOL-VALID, and CONTEXTUAL RULE REQUIRED categories
cannot be evaluated until a character is actually assigned and known.
There are several reasons for this, with the most important ones
being:
o Tests involving the context of characters (e.g., some characters
being permitted only adjacent to others of specific types) and
integrity tests on complete labels are needed. Unassigned code
points cannot be permitted because one cannot determine whether
particular code points will require contextual rules (and what
those rules should be) before characters are assigned to them and
the properties of those characters fully understood.
o It cannot be known in advance, and with sufficient reliability,
that a no newly-assigned code point will associated with a
character that would be disallowed by the rules in
[IDNA2008-Tables] (such as a compatibility character). In
IDNA2003, since there is no direct dependency on NFKC (many of the
entries in Stringprep's tables are based on NFKC, but IDNA2003
depends only on Stringprep), allocation of a compatibility
character might produce some odd situations, but it would not be a
problem. In IDNA2008, where compatibility characters are
DISALLOWED unless character-specific exceptions are made,
permitting strings containing unassigned characters to be looked
up would violate the principle that characters in DISALLOWED are
not looked up.
o The Unicode Standard specifies that an unassigned code point
normalizes (and, where relevant, case folds) to itself. If the
code point is later assigned to a character, and particularly if
the newly-assigned code point has a combining class that
determines its placement relative to other combining characters,
it could normalize to some other code point or sequence.
It is possible to argue that the issues above are not important and
that, as a consequence, it is better to retain the principle of
looking up labels even if they contain unassigned characters because
all of the important scripts and characters have been coded as of
Unicode 5.1 and hence unassigned code points will be assigned only to
obscure characters or archaic scripts. Unfortunately, that does not
appear to be a safe assumption for at least two reasons. First, much
the same claim of completeness has been made for earlier versions of
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Unicode. The reality is that a script that is obscure to much of the
world may still be very important to those who use it. Cultural and
linguistic preservation principles make it inappropriate to declare
the script of no importance in IDNs. Second, we already have
counterexamples in, e.g., the relationships associated with new Han
characters being added (whether in the BMP or in Unicode Plane 2).
Independent of the technical transition issues identified above, it
can be observed that any addition of characters to an existing script
to make it easier to use or to better accommodate particular
languages may lead to transition issues. Such changes may change the
preferred form for writing a particular string, changes that may be
reflected, e.g., in keyboard transition modules that would
necessarily be different from those for earlier versions of Unicode
where the newer characters may not exist. This creates an inherent
transition problem because attempts to access labels may use either
the old or the new conventions, requiring registry action whether the
older conventions were used in labels or not. The need to consider
transition mechanisms is inherent to evolution of Unicode to better
accommodate writing systems and is independent of how IDNs are
represented in the DNS or how transitions among versions of those
mechanisms occur. The requirement for transitions of this type is
illustrated by the addition of Malayalam Chillu in Unicode 5.1.0.
7.8. Other Compatibility Issues
The 2003 IDNA model includes several odd artifacts of the context in
which it was developed. Many, if not all, of these are potential
avenues for exploits, especially if the registration process permits
"source" names (names that have not been processed through IDNA and
Nameprep) to be registered. As one example, since the character
Eszett, used in German, is mapped by IDNA2003 into the sequence "ss"
rather than being retained as itself or prohibited, a string
containing that character but that is otherwise in ASCII is not
really an IDN (in the U-label sense defined above) at all. After
Nameprep maps the Eszett out, the result is an ASCII string and so
does not get an xn-- prefix, but the string that can be displayed to
a user appears to be an IDN. The newer version of the protocol
eliminates this artifact. A character is either permitted as itself
or it is prohibited; special cases that make sense only in a
particular linguistic or cultural context can be dealt with as
localization matters where appropriate.
8. Name Server Considerations
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8.1. Processing Non-ASCII Strings
Existing DNS servers do not know the IDNA rules for handling non-
ASCII forms of IDNs, and therefore need to be shielded from them.
All existing channels through which names can enter a DNS server
database (for example, master files (as described in RFC 1034) and
DNS update messages [RFC2136]) are IDN-unaware because they predate
IDNA. Other sections of this document provide the needed shielding
by ensuring that internationalized domain names entering DNS server
databases through such channels have already been converted to their
equivalent ASCII A-label forms.
Because of the distinction made between the algorithms for
Registration and Lookup in [IDNA2008-Protocol] (a domain name
containing only ASCII codepoints can not be converted to an A-label),
there can not be more than one A-label form for any given U-label.
As specified in RFC 2181 [RFC2181], the DNS protocol explicitly
allows domain labels to contain octets beyond the ASCII range
(0000..007F), and this document does not change that. However,
although the interpretation of octets 0080..00FF is well-defined in
the DNS, many application protocols support only ASCII labels and
there is no defined interpretation of these non-ASCII octets as
characters and, in particular, no interpretation of case-independent
matching for them (see, e.g., [RFC4343]). If labels containing these
octets are returned to applications, unpredictable behavior could
result. The A-label form, which cannot contain those characters, is
the only standard representation for internationalized labels in the
DNS protocol.
8.2. DNSSEC Authentication of IDN Domain Names
DNS Security (DNSSEC) [RFC2535] is a method for supplying
cryptographic verification information along with DNS messages.
Public Key Cryptography is used in conjunction with digital
signatures to provide a means for a requester of domain information
to authenticate the source of the data. This ensures that it can be
traced back to a trusted source, either directly or via a chain of
trust linking the source of the information to the top of the DNS
hierarchy.
IDNA specifies that all internationalized domain names served by DNS
servers that cannot be represented directly in ASCII MUST use the
A-label form. Conversion to A-labels MUST be performed prior to a
zone being signed by the private key for that zone. Because of this
ordering, it is important to recognize that DNSSEC authenticates a
domain name containing A-labels or conventional LDH-labels, not
U-labels. In the presence of DNSSEC, no form of a zone file or query
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response that contains a U-label may be signed or the signature
validated.
One consequence of this for sites deploying IDNA in the presence of
DNSSEC is that any special purpose proxies or forwarders used to
transform user input into IDNs must be earlier in the lookup flow
than DNSSEC authenticating nameservers for DNSSEC to work.
8.3. Root and other DNS Server Considerations
IDNs in A-label form will generally be somewhat longer than current
domain names, so the bandwidth needed by the root servers is likely
to go up by a small amount. Also, queries and responses for IDNs
will probably be somewhat longer than typical queries historically,
so EDNS0 [RFC2671] support may be more important (otherwise, queries
and responses may be forced to go to TCP instead of UDP).
9. Internationalization Considerations
DNS labels and fully-qualified domain names provide mnemonics that
assist in identifying and referring to resources on the Internet.
IDNs expand the range of those mnemonics to include those based on
languages and character sets other than Western European and Roman-
derived ones. But domain "names" are not, in general, words in any
language. The recommendations of the IETF policy on character sets
and languages, (BCP 18 [RFC2277]) are applicable to situations in
which language identification is used to provide language-specific
contexts. The DNS is, by contrast, global and international and
ultimately has nothing to do with languages. Adding languages (or
similar context) to IDNs generally, or to DNS matching in particular,
would imply context dependent matching in DNS, which would be a very
significant change to the DNS protocol itself. It would also imply
that users would need to identify the language associated with a
particular label in order to look that label up. That knowledge is
generally not available because many labels are not words in any
language and some may be words in more than one.
10. IANA Considerations
This section gives an overview of IANA registries required for IDNA.
The actual definitions of, and specifications for, the first two,
which must be newly-created for IDNA2008, appear in
[IDNA2008-Tables]. This document describes the registries but does
not specify any IANA actions.
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10.1. IDNA Character Registry
The distinction among the major categories "UNASSIGNED",
"DISALLOWED", "PROTOCOL-VALID", and "CONTEXTUAL RULE REQUIRED" is
made by special categories and rules that are integral elements of
[IDNA2008-Tables]. While not normative, an IANA registry of
characters and scripts and their categories, updated for each new
version of Unicode and the characters it contains, will be convenient
for programming and validation purposes. The details of this
registry are specified in [IDNA2008-Tables].
10.2. IDNA Context Registry
IANA will create and maintain a list of approved contextual rules for
characters that are defined in the IDNA Character Registry list as
requiring a Contextual Rule (i.e., the types of rule described in
Section 3.1.2). The details for those rules appear in
[IDNA2008-Tables].
10.3. IANA Repository of IDN Practices of TLDs
This registry, historically described as the "IANA Language Character
Set Registry" or "IANA Script Registry" (both somewhat misleading
terms) is maintained by IANA at the request of ICANN. It is used to
provide a central documentation repository of the IDN policies used
by top level domain (TLD) registries who volunteer to contribute to
it and is used in conjunction with ICANN Guidelines for IDN use.
It is not an IETF-managed registry and, while the protocol changes
specified here may call for some revisions to the tables, these
specifications have no direct effect on that registry and no IANA
action is required as a result.
11. Security Considerations
11.1. General Security Issues with IDNA
This document is purely explanatory and informational and
consequently introduces no new security issues. It would, of course,
be a poor idea for someone to try to implement from it; such an
attempt would almost certainly lead to interoperability problems and
might lead to security ones. A discussion of security issues with
IDNA, including some relevant history, appears in [IDNA2008-Defs].
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12. Acknowledgments
The editor and contributors would like to express their thanks to
those who contributed significant early (pre-WG) review comments,
sometimes accompanied by text, especially Mark Davis, Paul Hoffman,
Simon Josefsson, and Sam Weiler. In addition, some specific ideas
were incorporated from suggestions, text, or comments about sections
that were unclear supplied by Vint Cerf, Frank Ellerman, Michael
Everson, Asmus Freytag, Erik van der Poel, Michel Suignard, and Ken
Whistler, although, as usual, they bear little or no responsibility
for the conclusions the editor and contributors reached after
receiving their suggestions. Thanks are also due to Vint Cerf, Lisa
Dusseault, Debbie Garside, and Jefsey Morfin for conversations that
led to considerable improvements in the content of this document.
A meeting was held on 30 January 2008 to attempt to reconcile
differences in perspective and terminology about this set of
specifications between the design team and members of the Unicode
Technical Consortium. The discussions at and subsequent to that
meeting were very helpful in focusing the issues and in refining the
specifications. The active participants at that meeting were (in
alphabetic order as usual) Harald Alvestrand, Vint Cerf, Tina Dam,
Mark Davis, Lisa Dusseault, Patrik Faltstrom (by telephone), Cary
Karp, John Klensin, Warren Kumari, Lisa Moore, Erik van der Poel,
Michel Suignard, and Ken Whistler. We express our thanks to Google
for support of that meeting and to the participants for their
contributions.
Useful comments and text on the WG versions of the draft were
received from many participants in the IETF "IDNABIS" WG and a number
of document changes resulted from mailing list discussions made by
that group. Marcos Sanz provided specific analysis and suggestions
that were exceptionally helpful in refining the text, as did Vint
Cerf, Mark Davis, Martin Duerst, Andrew Sullivan, and Ken Whistler.
Lisa Dusseault provided extensive editorial suggestions during the
spring of 2009, most of which were incorporated.
13. Contributors
While the listed editor held the pen, the core of this document and
the initial WG version represents the joint work and conclusions of
an ad hoc design team consisting of the editor and, in alphabetic
order, Harald Alvestrand, Tina Dam, Patrik Faltstrom, and Cary Karp.
In addition, there were many specific contributions and helpful
comments from those listed in the Acknowledgments section and others
who have contributed to the development and use of the IDNA
protocols.
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14. References
14.1. Normative References
[ASCII] American National Standards Institute (formerly United
States of America Standards Institute), "USA Code for
Information Interchange", ANSI X3.4-1968, 1968.
ANSI X3.4-1968 has been replaced by newer versions with
slight modifications, but the 1968 version remains
definitive for the Internet.
[IDNA2008-Bidi]
Alvestrand, H. and C. Karp, "An updated IDNA criterion for
right to left scripts", July 2008, .
[IDNA2008-Defs]
Klensin, J., "Internationalized Domain Names for
Applications (IDNA): Definitions and Document Framework",
November 2008, .
[IDNA2008-Protocol]
Klensin, J., "Internationalized Domain Names in
Applications (IDNA): Protocol", November 2008, .
[IDNA2008-Tables]
Faltstrom, P., "The Unicode Code Points and IDNA",
July 2008, .
A version of this document is available in HTML format at
http://stupid.domain.name/idnabis/
draft-ietf-idnabis-tables-02.html
[RFC3490] Faltstrom, P., Hoffman, P., and A. Costello,
"Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)",
RFC 3490, March 2003.
[RFC3492] Costello, A., "Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode
for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
(IDNA)", RFC 3492, March 2003.
[Unicode-UAX15]
The Unicode Consortium, "Unicode Standard Annex #15:
Unicode Normalization Forms", March 2008,
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.
[Unicode51]
The Unicode Consortium, "The Unicode Standard, Version
5.1.0", 2008.
defined by: The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0, Boston, MA,
Addison-Wesley, 2007, ISBN 0-321-48091-0, as amended by
Unicode 5.1.0
(http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.1.0/).
14.2. Informative References
[BIG5] Institute for Information Industry of Taiwan, "Computer
Chinese Glyph and Character Code Mapping Table, Technical
Report C-26", 1984.
There are several forms and variations and a closely-
related standard, CNS 11643. See the discussion in
Chapter 3 of Lunde, K., CJKV Information Processing,
O'Reilly & Associates, 1999
[GB18030] "Chinese National Standard GB 18030-2000: Information
Technology -- Chinese ideograms coded character set for
information interchange -- Extension for the basic set.",
2000.
[RFC0810] Feinler, E., Harrenstien, K., Su, Z., and V. White, "DoD
Internet host table specification", RFC 810, March 1982.
[RFC0952] Harrenstien, K., Stahl, M., and E. Feinler, "DoD Internet
host table specification", RFC 952, October 1985.
[RFC1034] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - concepts and facilities",
STD 13, RFC 1034, November 1987.
[RFC1035] Mockapetris, P., "Domain names - implementation and
specification", STD 13, RFC 1035, November 1987.
[RFC1123] Braden, R., "Requirements for Internet Hosts - Application
and Support", STD 3, RFC 1123, October 1989.
[RFC2136] Vixie, P., Thomson, S., Rekhter, Y., and J. Bound,
"Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System (DNS UPDATE)",
RFC 2136, April 1997.
[RFC2181] Elz, R. and R. Bush, "Clarifications to the DNS
Specification", RFC 2181, July 1997.
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[RFC2277] Alvestrand, H., "IETF Policy on Character Sets and
Languages", BCP 18, RFC 2277, January 1998.
[RFC2535] Eastlake, D., "Domain Name System Security Extensions",
RFC 2535, March 1999.
[RFC2671] Vixie, P., "Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS0)",
RFC 2671, August 1999.
[RFC2673] Crawford, M., "Binary Labels in the Domain Name System",
RFC 2673, August 1999.
[RFC2782] Gulbrandsen, A., Vixie, P., and L. Esibov, "A DNS RR for
specifying the location of services (DNS SRV)", RFC 2782,
February 2000.
[RFC3454] Hoffman, P. and M. Blanchet, "Preparation of
Internationalized Strings ("stringprep")", RFC 3454,
December 2002.
[RFC3491] Hoffman, P. and M. Blanchet, "Nameprep: A Stringprep
Profile for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)",
RFC 3491, March 2003.
[RFC3743] Konishi, K., Huang, K., Qian, H., and Y. Ko, "Joint
Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized
Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean", RFC 3743, April 2004.
[RFC3987] Duerst, M. and M. Suignard, "Internationalized Resource
Identifiers (IRIs)", RFC 3987, January 2005.
[RFC4290] Klensin, J., "Suggested Practices for Registration of
Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)", RFC 4290,
December 2005.
[RFC4343] Eastlake, D., "Domain Name System (DNS) Case Insensitivity
Clarification", RFC 4343, January 2006.
[RFC4690] Klensin, J., Faltstrom, P., Karp, C., and IAB, "Review and
Recommendations for Internationalized Domain Names
(IDNs)", RFC 4690, September 2006.
[RFC4713] Lee, X., Mao, W., Chen, E., Hsu, N., and J. Klensin,
"Registration and Administration Recommendations for
Chinese Domain Names", RFC 4713, October 2006.
[Unicode-Security]
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The Unicode Consortium, "Unicode Technical Standard #39:
Unicode Security Mechanisms", August 2008,
.
[Unicode-UAX31]
The Unicode Consortium, "Unicode Standard Annex #31:
Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax", March 2008,
.
[Unicode-UTR36]
The Unicode Consortium, "Unicode Technical Report #36:
Unicode Security Considerations", July 2008,
.
Appendix A. Change Log
[[ RFC Editor: Please remove this appendix. ]]
A.1. Changes between Version -00 and Version -01 of
draft-ietf-idnabis-rationale
o Clarified the U-label definition to note that U-labels must
contain at least one non-ASCII character. Also clarified the
relationship among label types.
o Rewrote the discussion of Labels in Registration (Section 7.1.2)
and related text about IDNA-validity (in the "Defs" document as of
-04 of this one) to narrow its focus and remove more general
restrictions. Added a temporary note in line to explain the
situation.
o Changed the "IDNA uses Unicode" statement to focus on
compatibility with IDNA2003 and avoid more general or
controversial assertions.
o Added a discussion of examples to Section 7.1
o Made a number of other small editorial changes and corrections
suggested by Mark Davis.
o Added several more discussion anchors and notes and expanded or
updated some existing ones.
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A.2. Version -02
o Trimmed change log, removing information about pre-WG drafts.
o Adjusted discussion of Contextual Rules to match the new location
of the tables and some conceptual material.
o Rewrote the material on preprocessing somewhat.
o Moved the material about relationships with IDNA2003 to be part of
a single section on transitions.
o Removed several placeholders and made editorial changes in
accordance with decisions made at IETF 72 in Dublin and not
disputed on the mailing list.
A.3. Version -03
This special update to the Rationale document is intended to try to
get the discussion of what is normative or not under control. While
the IETF does not normally annotate individual sections of documents
with whether they are normative or not, concerns that we don't know
which is which, claims that some material is normative that would be
problematic if so classified, etc., argue that we should at least be
able to have a clear discussion on the subject.
Two annotations have been applied to sections that might reasonably
be considered normative. One annotation is based on the list of
sections in Mark Davis's note of 29 September (http://
www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/2008-September/002667.html).
The other is based on an elaboration of John Klensin's response on 7
October (http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/2008-October/
002691.html). These should just be considered two suggestions to
illuminate and, one hopes, advance the Working Group's discussions.
Some additional editorial changes have been made, but they are
basically trivial. In the editor's judgment, it is not possible to
make significantly more progress with this document until the matter
of document organization is settled.
A.4. Version -04
o Definitional and other normative material moved to new document
(draft-ietf-idnabis-defs). Version -03 annotations removed.
o Material on differences between IDNA2003 and IDNA2008 moved to an
appendix in Protocol.
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o Material left over from the origins of this document as a
preliminary proposal has been removed or rewritten.
o Changes made to reflect consensus call results, including removing
several placeholder notes for discussion.
o Added more material, including discussion of historic scripts, to
Section 3.2 on registration policies.
o Added a new section (Section 7.2) to contain specific discussion
of handling of characters that are interpreted differently in
input to IDNA2003 and 2008.
o Some material, including this section/appendix, rearranged.
A.5. Version -05
o Many small editorial changes, including changes to eliminate the
last vestiges of what appeared to be 2119 language (upper-case
MUST, SHOULD, or MAY) and small adjustments to terminology.
A.6. Version -06
o Removed Security Considerations material and pointed to Defs,
where it now appears as of version 05.
o Started changing uses of "IDNA2008" in running text to "in these
specifications" or the equivalent. These documents are titled
simply "IDNA"; once they are standardized, "the current version"
may be a more appropriate reference than one containing a year.
As discussed on the mailing list, we can and should discuss how to
refer to these documents at an appropriate time (e.g., when we
know when we will be finished) but, in the interim, it seems
appropriate to simply start getting rid of the version-specific
terminology where it can naturally be removed.
o Additional discussion of mappings, etc., especially for case-
sensitivity.
o Clarified relationship to base DNS specifications.
o Consolidated discussion of lookup of unassigned characters.
o More editorial fine-tuning.
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A.7. Version -07
o Revised terminology by adding terms: NR-LDH-label, Invalid-A-label
(or False-A-label), R-LDH-label, valid IDNA-label in
Section 1.3.3.
o Moved the "name server considerations" material to this document
from Protocol because it is non-normative and not part of the
protocol itself.
o To improve clarity, redid discussion of the reasons why looking up
unassigned code points is prohibited.
o Editorial and other non-substantive corrections to reflect earlier
errors as well as new definitions and terminology.
A.8. Version -08
o Slight revision to "contextual" discussion (Section 3.1.2) and
moving it to a separate subsection, rather than under "PVALID",
for better parallelism with Tables. Also reflected Mark's
comments about the limitations of the approach.
o Added placeholder notes as reminders of where references to the
other documents need Section numbers. More of these will be added
as needed (feel free to identify relevant places), but the actual
section numbers will not be inserted until the documents are
completely stable, i.e., on their way to the RFC Editor.
A.9. Version -09
o Small editorial changes to clarify transition possibilities.
o Small clarification to the description of DNS "exact match".
o Added discussion of adding characters to an existing script to the
discussion of unassigned code point transitions in Section 7.7.
o Tightened up the discussion of non-ASCII string processing
(Section 8.1) slightly.
o Removed some placeholders and comments that have been around long
enough to be considered acceptable or that no longer seem
necessary for other reasons.
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A.10. Version -10
o Extensive editorial improvements, mostly due to suggestions from
Lisa Dusseault.
o Changes required for the new "mapping" approach and document have,
in general, not been incorporated despite several suggestions.
The editor intends to wait until the mapping model is stable, or
at least until -11 of this document, before trying to incorporate
those suggestions.
Author's Address
John C Klensin
1770 Massachusetts Ave, Ste 322
Cambridge, MA 02140
USA
Phone: +1 617 245 1457
Email: john+ietf@jck.com
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