Stop me if I've misunderstood...
Gervase Markham
gerv at mozilla.org
Wed Jul 8 22:03:12 CEST 2009
I must confess that I've not had time recently to follow carefully the
discussions about mappings. If that means that some people consign this
message to the bit bucket, so be it.
At the moment, standard domain names have what I'll call "bus-ability" -
that is, if you see them in an advert on the side of a bus, you can
write them down, type them into any web browser or other domain
name-using client later, and you'll end up at the place intended by the
creator of the advertisement. IDN domain names under the current version
of IDN have, as far as I understand it, pretty much the same
"bus-ability" property. In the IDN case, what the user types has to be
first normalized, and then converted to punycode. The user in no way
needs to know or care about this extra technical complexity. It just works.
I would assert that this property is pretty key to keeping the web
working in a sane and, importantly, secure manner. People convert domain
names from print/voice/memory to computer and back all the time.
If the standards were to change in such a way that it becomes quite
legal and conforming that typing a set of characters into browser A
takes you to website Q, but typing the same set into browser B takes you
to website R, I would politely suggest that those who wrote the new
standards had taken leave of their senses. This is a recipe for chaos.
And phishing.
This incredible outcome is not a serious possibility, is it?
Gerv
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