Distributed configuration of "private" IDNA (Re: IDNA and getnameinfo() and getaddrinfo())

[Nicolas Williams]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 10:56:28PM +0000, Shawn Steele wrote:
> > If a user e-mails another a URL using an IDN encoded in UTF-8, 
> > and the receipient tries to load it with FF, and the namespace in
> > question uses UTF-8 instead of IDNA ACE encoding, will the FF
> > user be able to load that URL?
> 
> It should, the OS sends the request to whatever your default browser
> is in Unicode, the browser better be able to correctly handle the
> link.  AFAIK there's no big problems in this area in Windows (maybe

So the OS knows about the intranet/internet distinction?  Dave Thaler's
comments had led me to believe it was IE that knew this.  What if parts
of the intranet are not hosted on AD?  Where's the intranet/internet
distinction configured?

> some edge cases).  Since we use *W APIs for everything, most of these
> scenarios work.  Problem is only if the client doesn't know how to
> punycode, or if punycode gets injected unexpectedly into the *W API
> calls, or if there's some other protocol dependency that hasn't been
> updated beyond ASCII.

And if the receipient is running FF on something other than Windows?
(e.g., MacOS X, Linux, Solaris, *BSD.)

I'm guessing the answer is "no", "I don't know", or even "good luck" :)

The point is: your private-namespace-with-UTF-8-instead-of-IDNA solution
is almost certainly not interoperable in heterogeneous deployments.

(Pardon the redundancy.  I shouldn't have to say "in heterogeneous
deployments", because that's implied, to me, by the word
"interoperable", but I do so anyways to be extra clear.)

Nico
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