Re: [idn] URL encoding in html page

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 8:47 AM +0100 3/27/02, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
>It is important that existing RFCs like the one for the URL, imediately
>be
>updated to allow non-ASCII letters. And do not use the IETF hacker
>language
>and call it IRI, for the common man it will be a URL and URI.
>People will not ACE encode host names in URLs, people will not
>%-encode paths in URLs. They will do like they do today: use native
>character
>set of the HTML document. Ignoring reality does not work.

Quite true. The proposal to allow anyone to enter host names in URLs 
using any native encoding scheme, certainly ignores the reality that 
every DNS server would have to have equivalents for every name in 
every conceivable encoding scheme.

Similarly, the proposal to allow people to enter host names in URIs 
using only UTF-8 ignores the reality that many people enter text in 
many different encoding schemes and often have no idea what scheme 
they are using at the moment (the text on the screen appears the same 
regardless of the encoding scheme).

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium