[Patch] internatinal domain names for email addresses

[Simon Josefsson]

David Shaw <dshaw at jabberwocky.com> writes:

> On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 05:16:27PM +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> David Shaw <dshaw at jabberwocky.com> writes:
>> 
>> >> 1) key selection:
>> >> gpg --edit-key user at xn--fiq228c.idn.kuehne.cn
>> >> gpg --edit-key user@??????.idn.kuehne.cn
>> >
>> > Perhaps I am missing something, but it strikes me that users should
>> > never be using the punycode format directly.  This is an encoding to
>> > accomodate software that cannot handle unicode.  Since GnuPG does
>> > handle unicode, the user should be using the actual unicode name and
>> > not translating it and then typing in the translation.
>> 
>> The IDNA specification require that any field that is IDN-unaware use
>> the punycode format.  RFC 3490:
>> 
>>    An "IDN-unaware domain name slot" is defined in this document to be
>>    any domain name slot that is not an IDN-aware domain name slot.
>>    Obviously, this includes any domain name slot whose specification
>>    predates IDNA.
>> ...
>>    2) Whenever a domain name is put into an IDN-unaware domain name slot
>>       (see section 2), it MUST contain only ASCII characters.
>> 
>> The OpenPGP specification could be updated to say that the any RFC
>> 2822 User-ID field may be considered IDN-aware.  More changes may be
>> required as well.
>
> Not impossible, I suppose, but it's a little tricky with OpenPGP since
> OpenPGP user IDs do not have *any* "domain name slot".  User IDs are
> just a UTF8 string.  The whole "Name <email at example.com>" syntax is
> just tradition.

Given how IDNA is written, I suspect the only option is to encode the
tradition in the specification, and make it clear for implementations
whether the field is IDN-aware or not.

Or OpenPGP could adopt a better i18n-strategy than IDNA, but I suspect
the IETF would disagree with that.

Thanks,
Simon