Re: [idn] universal typability

[bill@mail.nic.nu (J. William Semich)]

Hi James;

I assume in your comments below you have taken off your hat as
"co-chairman" and are speaking as CTO for i-dns.net, correct? <smile>


Bill Semich
.NU Domain

At 09:35 AM 3/17/00 +0800, James Seng wrote:
>What you describe is not a problem with ASCII compatiblity encoding scheme.
>
>For the record, %HH encoding scheme was designed for the <path> side of URL
>and not the <hostname>. Therefore, by strict implementation, %HH in hostname
>should not have work, on any broswer. 
>
>The real problem is lack of standardisation with IDN and people went off
their
>own ways to do IDN, thus causing inconsistency. This is why this WG is so
>important.
>
>-James Seng
>
>ps: the reason why MSIE works for UTF-8 domain names is because MSIE act
smart
>to do a conversation with UTF-8 for domain names. It seem cool to be able to
>do multilingual domain names. But this is not a prove that UTF-8 in URL is
>okay because it is not. There are a lot of bugs and problems if you look into
>this more carefully. For example, try typing the sample domain name provided
>into a Chinese MSIE broswer. Or try Chinese URL (take it from
www.idns.org) on
>a English MSIE. And there are also a few buggy downcasing by MSIE which cause
>'wrong' UTF-8 been send out.
>
>Spend a little more time understanding the consequences with MSIE UTF-8
domain
>name and the picture are not so rosy anymore.
>
>Dan Oscarsson wrote:
>> This show one of the problems Kent is talking about.
>> A URL like: http://www.gås.net/gås.html
>> could look like: http://www.8wahdfhud.net/g%c3%a5s.html
>> if we use an opaque scheme for domain names.
>> The %-encoding should not be used in the domain name part.
>> Think about the mess otherwise:
>>   Should I do ftp www.8wahdfhud.net or www.g%c3%a5s.net?
>>   Why does ftp www.8wahdfhud.net work but not ftp www.g%c3%a5s.net.
>>   But in my browser ftp://www.g%c3%a5s.net/ does work.
>> 
>> If we use ASCII compatibility encodings, the same object must
>> be encoded using the same scheme everywhere, if possible.
>> What a mess otherwise.
>> 
>>    Dan
>
>
Bill Semich
President and Founder
.NU Domain Ltd
http://whats.nu
bill@mail.nic.nu