Mappings - some examples

[Shawn Steele]

> Yet your example contains a case where Herr Stosser and Herr Stoßer are
> different people, with different spellings of their names.  

If Herr Stoßer moved to Switzerland from Germany, then they may be the same person.  And Fussball.de is clearly "correctly" spelled Fußball.de (since it's not fussball.ch), yet I don't think you'll find any German speaker in any country that thinks fussball and fußball mean different things.  There may be disagreement in the preferred spelling, but, even in Germany, the spellings are effectively interchangeable.  I also seriously doubt you'd find a German speaker that'd mispronounce fussball either.

For Herrs Stoßer and Stosser, there's no guarantee that some other Herr Stosser didn't beat him to the registrar.  I certainly can't register Steele.com.  DNS certainly has no guarantees of preferred uniqueness.  I also can't register fluke.com in English for a lucky web site if you've already registered fluke.com as a save-the-whales web site.  A coking plant can't even register coke.com to talk about their petroleum products.  The risk of pointing to the "wrong" web site for ß and ss outweighs the ability to make them different web sites in the fairly rare cases when the difference is linguistically interesting.

Note I don't say that ß and ss shouldn't be presented "correctly" for the web site owner, just that they can be reasonably expected to go to the same place.  If Fussball.de prefers to be displayed as Fußball.de, that should be permitted, but they should both get you to the same server.

-Shawn