Hi!
I agree for the protocol itself nothing else is needed. But for tools
presenting TXT records to humans it does matter what encoding it is.
People use also different character sets with letters not present in
US-ASCII. TXT records are unstructured and I think should be easy to
process by people. Some languages use latin letters with some additions,
like my native Czech. Other languages use completely different alphabet.
Current command-line tools escape UTF-8 encoding into /DDD form. Which
is definitively not easy to read by human. I think it should be
presented as UTF-8 encoded text whenever it is valid UTF-8 encoding.
Escape it only if it is not.
I created bind9 feature request:
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/bind9/-/issues/5643
But I think it should be clarified, how this should be presented. DNS-SD
can store quite a lot of information into those records. I think it
makes sense to allow native speakers to insert text descriptions in
whatever language it is easiest for them to read. Current utilities do
not make that simple.
whatsmydns.net service displays nice utf-8 encoded TXT record. But
breaks when non-UTF-8 record appears. Some recommendation how unicode
code points present in TXT records should be presented.
Try this:
https://www.whatsmydns.net/dns-lookup/txt-records?query=pihhan.info&server=google
I think there should be recommendation how to present data in TXT
records. Escaping characters with value >= 127 does not work well for
non-english languages. It is supposed to be a text, not binary data. It
should be presented as text then, if we think it can be displayed.
Petr
On 13/11/2025 21:07, Dave Lawrence wrote:
The encoding to be used is octets, nothing more, nothing less. For
the DNS protocol itself nothing else is needed.
As to whether someone wants to stuff UTF-8 or UTF-16 or EBCDIC or
whatever into the RDATA of a TXT record or something, that's between
the producers and consumers of the data. The DNS doesn't care.
While I am somewhat sympathetic to the issue implied by your example
at
https://www.whatsmydns.net/dns-lookup/txt-records?query=tmp.testdns.nl&server=google
it's still just whatever octets the authority has decided to put
there. Insisting that 40 years in it be explicitly some particular
encoding would be a bad move.
Are there indications of confusion causing notable issues that need to
be addressed?
--
Petr Menšík
Senior Software Engineer, RHEL
Red Hat,https://www.redhat.com/
PGP: DFCF908DB7C87E8E529925BC4931CA5B6C9FC5CB
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