[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [idn] who should be doing IDN filtering



John C Klensin wrote:

None of these rules or conventions causes any interoperability (or balkanization) issues at all: a resolver either finds the name or doesn't, and is indifferent to whether a name that is not found isn't there because no one wanted to register it or because they were prohibited from doing so.

Yes, but as a browser developer, I *would* care about whether a user was able to easily type in a domain name and go where s/he wanted to go. In the presence of these homograph problems, a browser developer might even want to retry DNS lookups with different character codes until it succeeded. We can't just foist these solvable problems on the end-user.


We would have interoperability issues if someone tried to change
the resolution rules themselves: a local (and different) version
of the IDNA tables that would map a UTF-8-encoded Unicode string
to a different punycode string than is called for by the IDNA
and nameprep specs would be very bad news indeed.

You could use a prefix other than xn-- to migrate from the old to the new. I jotted down a few quick ideas here:


http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2005JanMar/0101.html

However, if I can't get support from the major organizations such as Microsoft, VeriSign and the Unicode Consortium (either because too many xn-- names have already been registered and the migration would not be practical or for some other reason), then I might just give up on this idea. But I'm willing to explore it some more.

Having individual applications
programs, such as browsers, guess what those rules are for a
given domain is, by contrast, a nightmare.

As a browser developer, I would not try to "guess" what those rules are. I would read them and try to implement them correctly.


any sort of "bad name" restriction on a name that is
IDNA-conformant would be really bad news, going far beyond the
messes I tried to warn about in RFC 3696.

Gotta go right now. I'll read that later.

Erik