RE: [idn] IDNs in IE and Google

["Michel Suignard" <michelsu@windows.microsoft.com>]

Concerning IRI, it is not a matter of 'preference'. If you present
something like a URI containing a host name presented in non ASCII
repertoire, you are in fact using an illegal URI per RFC2396 definition.
At minimum you need to have a clear definition on how such 'extended'
URI (in other words IRI) are mapped to legal URI. This is a big part of
the IRI draft spec currently worked on. The draft is at
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duerst-iri-05.txt. The same
goes for http, and any other URI schemes presented in browser user
interface.

To come back to IE, it doesn't really process DNS directly, it only sees
them as part of URI, thus the concern above.

The fact that I am also associated with the development of the IRI spec
(although Martin Duerst from W3C does most of the work) should give you
a hint that we are not just 'waiting' for IRI.

I can't really comment on future product planning (and this isn't really
the forum for that anyway), but obviously we are looking seriously at
IDN support. For the short term, there are many plug-ins available that
could offer partial solution.

I won't comment much on your last sentence, at least you put an
emoticon, so not be taken too seriously, just a tad irritating for the
few of us still trying to make a living writing/designing software.

Michel
PS. The reason I am answering this has to due that I wrote the
presentation linked below.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-idn@ops.ietf.org [mailto:owner-idn@ops.ietf.org] On Behalf
Of Stephane Bortzmeyer

On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 09:43:44PM +0100,  Georg Ochsner
<georg@ochsner.de> wrote  a message of 10 lines which said:

> does anybody know, when Microsoft will implement the new IDN standards

> in IE (service pack or something)?

The technical director of Microsoft France, Bernard Ourghanlian, queried
by AFNIC, replied that the are no immediate plans to support IDN,
Microsoft prefers to wait for "full" IRI.

A more detailed (and in english) reply from Microsoft is there:

http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/presentations/unicode23/a6.
pdf

Anyway, Real Men only use free software :-)