Subject: Protocol Action: Internationalizing Domain Names In Applications (IDNA) to Proposed Standard

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 14:51:18 -0400

The IESG has approved publication of the following Internet-Drafts as 
Proposed Standards:

o Internationalizing Domain Names In Applications (IDNA)
  <draft-ietf-idn-idna-14.txt> as a Proposed Standard.  
o Nameprep: A Stringprep Profile for Internationalized Domain Names
	  <draft-ietf-idn-nameprep-11.txt>
o Punycode: An encoding of Unocode for use with IDNA
	  <draft-ietf-idn-punycode-03.txt>

These documents are the product of the Internationalized Domain Name 
Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Erik Nordmark and Thomas 
Narten.

Technical Summary
 
This set documents provide the pieces of the IDNA architecture. 
They consist of the IDNA document itself, a stringprep profile for 
domain name labels (nameprep), and an encoding of Unicode strings into
letter-digit-hyphen ASCII strings (punycode).

These documents provide a mechanism to introduce Internationalized 
Domain Names without requiring any changes in the DNS itself; the IDN 
labels which contain non-ASCII characters are represented in the DNS 
using the ASCII compatible encoding (ACE) called Punycode. This 
representation can also be used when domain names are carried in 
IDN-unaware application protocols. Applications use the convertion 
routines specified in the IDNA document for coverting in both 
directions between the Unicode version of IDNs and the ACE versions of 
the IDNs.

Working Group Summary
 
The working group resolved some major comments in response to the IETF
last call (plus minor and editorial comments). The major comments where
  - change from using Unicode 3.1 to 3.2
  - added restrictions for bidirectional characters
  - making the applicability of IDNA more clear by adding an 
    applicability section to the IDNA document.

There was WG rough concensus to advance these document.

Protocol Quality
 
This document has been reviewed for the IESG by Erik Nordmark.