Updating RFC 5890-5893 (IDNA 2008) to Full Standard

["Martin J. Dürst"]

Hello Mark,

On 2012/11/16 8:56, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:

> Yet for companies like mine, compatibility is rather important; we need to
> ensure that URLs like http://ÖBB.at<http://xn--bb-eka.at>  continue to work
> as people expect, and URLs like
> http://www.amt-golßener-land.de/<http://www.amt-golssener-land.de/>go
> to a single location, rather than (depending on the browsers),
> sometimes:
>
>     - sometimes their original pages (http://www.amt-golssener-land.de)
>     - sometimes new pages (http://www.xn--amt-golener-land-mlb.de)

For Opera, http://www.amt-golßener-land.de/ goes to a Wordpress blog 
page about "IDNA2008 & ß". This means that with respect to ß, Opera 
implements IDNA2008. For other browsers (I tested IE9, Safari, Firefox 
and Chrome on Windows 7), this page can be reached at 
http://www.xn--amt-golener-land-mlb.de (as indicated above).

As far as I understand the plan behind IDNA2008, the idea was that 
first, the affected registries (and DENIC is the most affected here of 
course) will make sure that their registrees have a chance to catch up 
(with bundling, sunrise, or whatever). In a next step, the browsers 
would adopt.

DENIC did this with sunrise 
(http://www.denic.de/domains/internationalized-domain-names/einfuehrung-eszett.html 
mentions "Vorzugsregistrierung für die Inhaber bestehender Domains mit 
dem Namensbestandteil „ss“").

It looks like the owners of http://www.amt-golssener-land.de didn't use 
the sunrise opportunity. We don't know whether that's because they just 
missed it, because they had not enough money, because they didn't 
understand what was happening, because they thought nobody would use 
http://www.amt-golßener-land.de/ anyway, or because they wanted to 
protest IDNA 2008, or whatever other reason.

The domain business is (unfortunately I'd say, but that's difficult to 
change) not extremely customer-friendly, so we have to say "they had 
their chance". And my guess is that in this specific case, the owner of 
http://www.xn--amt-golener-land-mlb.de would probably give back that 
domain to the owner of http://www.amt-golssener-land.de if asked nicely. 
S/he also made it very clear that this is not the page of "Golßener 
Country County" at the top of the page ("Dies ist keine Seite des “Amt 
Golßener Land”. Dafür gehen Sie zu http://amt-golssener-land.de/").

So as far as DENIC is concerned, they have proceeded according to the 
overall plan. The domain owners also have had their say. So now the next 
step is that the browsers move. As far as I understand, this is the 
transition called out in TR46, and Opera just is a bit ahead on this 
transition curve compared to the other browsers.

As for "companies like yours", I understand that may mean the search 
business or the browser business, at the minimum. For the search 
business, it's not a single choice, so you can easily show both 
alternatives if there are alternatives, and can of course weight them as 
you see fit (that's where the best search engine wins). As for browsers, 
this was all part of the transition plan, so I think you should move 
ahead sooner rather than later.

As for http://ÖBB.at, that redirects to http://www.oebb.at/, so that's 
also not such a good example. Or are there still that many IE6 users in 
Austria :-?.

Regards,    Martin.