Additional thoughts on TRANSITIONAL

["Martin J. Dürst"]

Hello Andrew,

The registry/zone operator is one thing. But while e.g. .xy may be of 
the opinion that they never supported IDNA2003, I may have registered 
masse.xy with them, but all over the place I may have written <a 
href='www.maße.xy'> because my site is about measures (Maße), not about 
(physical body) mass (Masse). For the other three characters, the 
situation is quite a bit easier, of course.

So I think we cannot get around the fact that for some time, ß may stop 
to work at all if we want to get to the state that ss/ß are clearly 
distinguished where necessary. As a reminder, IE6 doesn't support IDNA, 
and so currently, ß still doesn't work for quite a bit (10%-25% 
depending on the statistic) of Web users.

Regards,   Martin.

On 2009/12/05 8:30, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
>
>
> On 2009-12-04, at 17:41, Lisa Dusseault<lisa.dusseault at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>   TRANSITIONAL character in the domain.
>>
>> I agree that in some models, an error is better than going to an
>> indeterminate destination.  But only in some models.  To the user,
>> upgrading their browser and suddenly having links with ß in domains
>> fail where it succeeded the day before, does not seem like a real up
>> grade.
>
> This is precisely the problem my admittedly kludgey suggestion is
> supposed to solve. If the registry (zone operator) has a policy to map
> as desired, then the upgrade works as hoped anyway. We could even
> include a mechanism to say "never had any idna2003" so that people who
> have waited for something better get the new benefits as soon as new
> browsers are deployed. (But the idea is still a pig,&  I'm not
> defending it hard.)
>
> A

-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp