Mapping Poll - REQUEST

[Patrik Fältström]

On 10 feb 2010, at 11.59, Gervase Markham wrote:

> On 09/02/10 18:18, Patrik Fältström wrote:
>> I agree with this, but unfortunately we already today have various
>> "games" going on by the applications, for example:
>> 
>> A. The addition of "www" and "com" and other various elements and
>> labels to a domain name when used for example in a web brower
> 
> I've seen this mentioned several times recently. Is it a sore point in
> the DNS community?

Yes. It confuses users. And it is specifically confusing when people guess domain names (as they do) and it tries .com as the TLD -- and that is a pay per click, a site with various content that is not fun for the organisation that have a similar domain name in for example .SE.

> FWIW, Firefox still does this when you press Ctrl-Enter, but it's not
> promoted anywhere or recommended. These days, browsers are much more
> likely to do a search on a word entered in the URL bar than add "www"
> and "com" to it. See Chrome, for example, whose "Omnibar" (I think they
> call it) looks up things that seem to be DNS names, and searches on
> everything else.

Correct.

>> B. The common addition of a search path that will automatically add
>> labels to the end of a domain name before resolution
> 
> Which is, of course, an OS feature rather than a browser one. And is not
> quite the same thing as typing "i" having a different effect in the UK
> as compared to Turkey.

You are correct in that it is a resolver issue and not application issue, but more and more applications include their own resolver, which then implement the same algorithm that was earlier in the normal resolver library.

For the user it does not really matter where the "change" is happening.

>> C. Various mappings if the end user uses a charset that is not
>> Unicode, similar to the ToUnicode(ToASCII(X)) mapping
> 
> A problem which is, again, going away as applications and OSes move
> towards Unicode. Is there any popular consumer OS today which is not
> Unicode based?

There are still many users that do not use Unicode as the charset of course. Of course, many charsets used do have direct 1:1 mappings to Unicode.

But yes, this goes away.

I just wanted to point out that these kind of "help" mechanisms that are different in different contexts already exists. It is not something new.

   Patrik