Isn't WHOIS a "standard protocol" itself?
Just barely, see RFC 3912. The standard says that the client sends a line of stuff, and the server sends back a blob of stuff that is somehow related to what was on the client's line of stuff. If any of the stuff can't be expressed in seven bit ASCII, too bad. For gTLDs that have thick WHOIS, the ICANN agreements describe in fair detail what the queries and responses are supposed to be, although the details differ from one agreement to another and none of them address IDNs. For gTLDs that have thin WHOIS, there's basically no spec, and the various registrars just make up whatever they want. I have 3000 line perl module that handles a lot of this, but far from all of it, and I constantly have to tweak it as I come across registries with formats that I haven't seen before. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly