On Mon, Mar 09, 2009 at 01:04:42PM -0400, Andrew Sullivan <a...@shinkuro.com> wrote a message of 59 lines which said:
> John's view is that the original "alphabetic restriction" in 1123 > was indeed intended as a restriction, I was not there at the creation but I find it worrying to rely on the recollection of one specific person. The "alphabetic-only" rule in RFC 1123 is just a side note, never detailed, and presented as a fact (which it was at this time), not as a mandatory restriction. It is nice to remove the ambiguity (and therefore draft-liman-tld-names is a good idea) but it should be treated as a small adjustment, not a big reform. > He argues that it is a good idea to be as restrictive as possible in > the top level, I completely fail to see why. Most reasons given were policy issues. Here, I fully agree with Edward Lewis's law "bus drivers shouldn't determine the bus route". There are no *TECHNICAL* reasons to limit TLD to alphabetic characters. There may be non-technical reasons and even valid non-technical reasons, but they are completely off-topic for the IETF. The IETF should be really careful not being used as a pretext in policy disputes. If some governance body wants to prohibit IDN in the root (which is the case today), they must not be able to say that it is per-request of the IETF. Because this would drag IETF in the line of fire. > His suggestion is to re-iterate the alphabetic-only criterion, This would turn a small ambiguity in RFC 1123 in a real rule. -1 for me. _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
