by Gary krall

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 01:25:16 +0000

Keith:

By way of introduction I am the technical director for the i-Nav family of plug-ins here at Verisign. Our plug-ins essentially provide resolution and display capabilities to IE, Outlook and Outlook Express. This is required until native support, as in the case of Mozilla is built into the application based on the standards you reference above.

You raised the question at the end:

"...so now my only question is how those are distinguished from ordinary domain names (how are the namespaces separate?)"

The point is that they are not. The encoding of the domain is an ASCII representation of that domain based upon the IDNA standards (which you reference above). As far as DNS is concerned this is in the same name space as any other ASCII domain. This is true for all domains irrespective of the TLD.

In other words lets take the domain: müller.de. The encoded form of this domain is: xn--mller-kva.de. If you did a DNS Dig of the name it would return the following:

<<>> DiG 2.1 <<>> @dns1.menandmice.is xn--mller-kva.de A (1 server found) ; res options: init recurs defnam dnsrch ; got answer: ; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10 ; flags: qr rd ra; Ques: 1, Ans: 1, Auth: 2, Addit: 0 ; QUESTIONS: ; xn--mller-kva.de, type = A, class = IN

; ANSWERS:

xn--mller-kva.de. 3600 A 81.2.176.59

; AUTHORITY RECORDS:

xn--mller-kva.de. 3600 NS ns1.nameservice.de.
xn--mller-kva.de. 3600 NS ns6.nameservice.de.

; Total query time: 166 msec ; FROM: us.mirror.menandmice.com to SERVER: default -- 0.0.0.0 ; WHEN: Wed Apr 14 18:24:01 2004 ; MSG SIZE sent: 34 rcvd: 98

Which as you can see is not in a separate namespace but directly in the dotDE zone.

Hope this helps.

Gary.

Keith's Weblog: Comments on "Internationalized Domain Names"

by Gary krall