Implementation questions (digressing from...)

[Mark Davis]

I am far from as sanguine as you are about this change. If we could pull a
magic switch that converted everyone (registries and all lookup programs)
from 2003 to 2008 at once, these 4 characters wouldn't be a problem. Sadly,
we are going to have a mixture for the indefinite future, and having an IRI
go to two different locations depending on the particular program -- or
version or program -- in use: that is a very significant interoperability
and security problem.

Along the lines of what you are talking about, I think one way to solve the
problem is to have a requirement on registries in the protocol, that
whenever two strings differ only by these characters, that they must either
bundle or block.

Mark


On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 12:00, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>wrote:

> Erik said:
>
> > Absolutely. However, the A-labels corresponding to U-labels that
> > contain eszett, final sigma, ZWJ and ZWNJ do not currently work in
> > IE7. We just have to pray that Microsoft will fix that, and that
> > users' copies of IE7 will be updated. If so, we don't need another
> > prefix.
>
> I'm not sure that prayer will be as effective as sending someone at
> Microsoft an email (like me) :)  I would hope that I don't seem
> unapproachable.
>
> Of course, IDNA2003 currently prohibits eszett, etc., so at this point
> there's nothing to "fix".
>
> It isn't clear to me (I haven't been paying a lot of attention in the last
> few weeks) that the backward compatibility issues have been resolved.  This
> is a "breaking" change for people who think they've registered a name with
> an eszett already.  A link with ß will change to ss, and changing that will
> break that link.
>
> In practice I cannot imagine myself registering an eszett form of a domain
> name without also registering the ss form of the name, regardless of
> spelling conventions.  If nothing else there are enough IDNA2003
> implementation in the wild that that'd be the only way I (as a web site
> owner) could guarantee that people would hit my site as intended.
>
> From a browser perspective, it seems that if I encountered an eszett I'd
> have to use the 2008 rules, and if those don't succeed, fall back to the
> 2003 rules.
>
> Just to randomize the conversation:  I can see where ß and ss can differ
> linguistically, but in practice I can't see how they can resolve to
> different domains.  <CrazyIdea>So it seems like I (as a domain owner) need
> the distinction primarily for display, not for resolution.  In other words:
> how about allowing PTR records or maybe a special CNAME or something that
> resolves a name to its preferred display form, undoing any mappings that
> were encoded?</CrazyIdea>
>
> - Shawn
>
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