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“Whois” Internationalization Issues

“Whois” Internationalization Issues. John C Klensin. Purpose of Panel. Raise issues and questions for thought and policy development Not to recommend particular solutions. IDNs: A Remedial Course. No actual non-ASCII characters in DNS – strings meet “hostname” constraints.

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“Whois” Internationalization Issues

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  1. “Whois” Internationalization Issues John C Klensin

  2. Purpose of Panel • Raise issues and questions for thought and policy development • Not to recommend particular solutions

  3. IDNs: A Remedial Course • No actual non-ASCII characters in DNS – strings meet “hostname” constraints. • Special encoding, called “punycode” • Applied as last step in conversion procedure • Label: “xn—” plus gibberish. “xn—” is the hint that the decoding rules should be invoked. • The real label – after decoding or before coding – is some Unicode form.

  4. Internationalization Changes Many Rules and Assumptions • Port 43 Whois is defined as ASCII only • So can’t query using Unicode or get a response in it. • Characters for query: • IDNA punycode or • Unicode (UTF-8) or • Local coded character set • A combination?? (multiple keys??) • One standard would be a good idea.

  5. The Response • Not much good if receiver can’t read it • All English? • All local language? • Local language plus English? • English… or choice of that or French, Russian, Chinese,… ? • Is it ok to expect someone to hire a translator?

  6. Queries and Responses Again • If can’t type the query, it will be hard to get an aswer. • Getting an answer in Klingon won’t help most of us, even if the query and database chars were to stay ASCII.

  7. Variants • Reserved names and their implications • How much information about names in the package if one asks for one of them? If the one asked for is not the primary one? Or is reserved?

  8. Summary • Time to take this seriously • Waiting will increase risk • People who expect the problem to solve itself are going to be disappointed • Use of “unusual” languages could make Whois useless • The NVT constraint for this may kill Port 43 Whois • Plan now, rather than having to clean up later.

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