[db-wg] Internationalized domain names in the data abase?

In message <0A69C7DE-D5E2-4B95-9643-82103F87B92B at ripe.net>, 
Edward Shryane <eshryane at ripe.net> wrote:

>Using ISO-8859-1 to encode IDN email addresses in the RIPE database does
>cause some issues:

We agree on that point, 100%.

>- Only a small subset of the UTF-8 character set is supported,
>characters outside ISO-8859-1 are substituted with a '?' on Whois
>update.

Yes.  And this is really rather entirely sub-optimal.

>- ISO-8859-1 encoded email addresses may not be handled properly by
>Whois clients or mail servers.

I personally am not too concerned about WHOIS client tools.  They can
adapt or die. :-)

It is certainly the case however that most or all existing WHOIS clients
do not contain any UTF-8 decoding logic, and that they thus will display
only 7-bit US-ASCII or, in some cases that and alo ISO-8859-1 encoded
single byte characters.

For all of these existing clients & tools it would be maximally convenient
to be able to cut-and-paste email addresses out of the WHOIS data base
records, as these tools render them, and directly into mail clients.
Either a UTF-8 encoding or a punycode encoding (of domain name) -might-
possibly work for that.

I personally prefer punycode because it is effectively the lowest common
denominator.  It does not force WHOIS clients or tools to support anything
beyond simple and primitive 7-bit US-ASCII, and yet it can still express
100% of all modern IDNs.


Regards,
rfg