The full character permutation set is daunting. How about simplified versus traditional Chinese? Or Chinese vs Japanese? Who knows what potential mischief lurks in the world's character sets? Which leads to the closely related problem of domains which contain semantically equivalent but visually different characters. In ASCII and Latin-1 we have upper/lower case so just naturally treat example.com and EXAMPLE.COM identically in the DNS. How does that concept extend to other character sets? I believe there are collisions between Arabic and Farsi, for example, or I once sat in on someone who seemed knowledgeable talking about this and how it affects domain uniqueness. Dennis Jennings worked on this, there were committees and coffee! -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*