Re: [idn] First report from IDN nameprep design team

["Adam M. Costello" <amc@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Frank Ernens <fgernens@enternet.com.au> wrote:

> If a domain name contains a soft hyphen, and is typeset onto paper
> such that no line break occurs, the soft hyphen is invisible

In case anyone hasn't already seen this...

http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/shy.html

It seems that there has always been widespread confusion and
disagreement about what soft hyphen means and how it should be treated.

Therefore soft hyphens should probably be disallowed in domain names.
When a user enters a soft hyphen, the options are to drop it, convert it
to a hyphen-minus, or reject the input and report an error.  The first
two options run the risk of doing something other than what the user
expects, so the last seems the safest.  But if there are input methods
that generate soft hyphens by default, that would be annoying.  Does
anyone know of any?

AMC