Standardizing on IDNA 2003 in the URL Standard

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Fri Aug 23 19:04:27 CEST 2013


Ø  Is the fact that the smiley is represented in ascii instead of unicode (😄 -SMILING FACE WITH OPEN MOUTH AND SMILING EYES) intended to be ironic?

That’s funny :) 😀  I hadn’t noticed



Ø  On a more serious note: this exchange made me go back and read http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4690#section-5.3

That’s sort of my point WRT the variant spellings.  DNS originally provided an easy way to describe a machine, “is 123.111.99.12 MIT or Stanford?”.  DNS wasn’t ever designed to provide precise branding for all the companies out there, it was intended to provide a mnemonic so we wouldn’t have to remember the number of the machine we wanted to talk to.

During the IDNA2008 discussions we seemed sort of torn, opting to include variations which are arguably confusable, yet aren’t really needed to resolve to a machine.  At the same time we decided smileys were unworthy.  I think there is a marketing desire to see a domain in a “pretty” form, even though there’s no technical need.  That’s why I think some sort of DNS record saying “this is my display form” would be good, so long as it round tripped through the normalization/mapping steps back into its canonical form.  Even then, there’s no way all the “AAA”s are going to be distinguishable.

-Shawn

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