Guidance on IDNs / Unicode in spec could be misinterpreted

[ankurdotb]

Section 4.3. International Domain Names of the current specification states:

[DID-CORE] identifier syntax does not allow Unicode in method name nor method specific identifiers.

Implementers should be cautious when implementing support for DID URLs that rely on domain names or path components that contain Unicode characters.

I can see how the "DID Syntax" section of DID Core could be interpreted as "does not allow Unicode or IDNs", but that's not my interpretation because ABNF for DID Core specifically calls out percent-encoding:

Indeed, to comply with RFC 3986 a lot of internationalized domain names are represented in their percent encoding form under the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) mechanism. W3C's own page on Multilingual Web Addresses gives the example of JP納豆.例.jp which results with IDNA normalisation to xn--jp-cd2fp15c.xn--fsq.jp.

Suggested solution

Do people agree with my interpretation, i.e., did:webvh and DIDs generally should be allowed for IDNs and Unicode characters BUT pointing them to percent-encoding / IDNA mechanism as guidance on how they should conform with DID Core's DID Syntax?

If yes, maybe I can suggest alternative text for Section 4.3. As it stands, it could be a bit misleading, and that would be a shame for a DID method that's so closely linked to domain names.

If my interpretation is incorrect...

...then this becomes an issue to raise and discuss in DID Core

[ankurdotb]

Relevant discussion in DID Core here, where Punycode / percent-encoding is discussed: w3c/did#699 (as it happens, that was in relation to did:web as well)