RE: Mississippi Hißes

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Fri Dec 11 02:07:30 CET 2009


> That seems to be headed down a garden path that wouldn't really serve anybody well.
> So Stewart & Stevenson: http://www.ssss.com/
> would then automatically trigger the bundling of what? ßss.com, sßs.com, sß.com, and ßß.com? Does anybody really want to go there?
> What about some snake afficionadoes who decide to register hissssssssss.com?

I'm going to go register hisssssssssssss.de and see what happens ;)

Ugh, I was being swayed toward the PVALID camp (from the PVALID-but-bundled camp, which, AFAICT was just me) and now you're all undoing that! (Which I don't think was your intent ;)

I get that Herr Fuß and Herr Fuss are different people and pronounce their names differently and all that, however can anyone give a demonstrable case where Fuß and Fuss MUST resolve to a different server.  (A case that  that doesn't involve display?)  I cannot.  The cases I can think of are:

1) Mississippi.com, where mißißippi.com is very much not expected, however Mississippi.com would have to expect that mißißippi.com might go there anyway (as well as tinyurl.com, gibberish.com, importantrivers.com, and IHateMississippi.com).  I could redirect or do all sorts of strange things to make it happen if I really wanted to.  This doesn't seem a case that REQUIRES differentiation.  I can't even have the satisfaction of knowing that English is "clean" of non-a-z characters since we often recognize naïve, café, and lots of other non-pure-ASCII words.  A foosball player would probably even recognize a "Fußball table".

2) Fußball.de had very well better point to fussball.de or else someone's going to get sued.  And if that happens, the .de NIC is going to be in the middle of it, so I bet they bundle anyway.  It's fairly clear that wherever a trademark or business name is involved that differentiation isn't legally possible.

3) That leaves Herren Fuß und Fuss.  I can readily see where they aren't going to bother suing, or maybe even care much, though there may be some minor confusion when they communicate with their Swiss friends.  But what happens when one's a Köln plumber and the other's a München plumber?  Or one sells autos and the other sells bier from the same town?  Those probably become case #2 and end up going to court.  I can't see that it's important enough to solve the questionable case of Fuss und Fuß, which doesn't even really work in practice, to break the lookup (not presentation!) behavior.

Are there any real cases where ß and ss MUST (or even SHOULD, or even "might be more interesting than symbols to") resolve to different servers?

If not, I "get" that we need them PVALID because they are different words and they need to be correctly represented, but instead of trying to force something that's distinct for presentation/authentication/whatever, but not lookup, into the presentation mold, why not recognize that they're special and figure out a way to solve them for presentation/authentication/whatever.  And do it without breaking the lookup behavior, which would work fine in IDNA2003 if it wasn't for the display issue.

So, are there any real cases where ß and ss MUST (or even SHOULD, or even "might be more interesting than symbols to") resolve to different servers?  Please convince me, I'll sleep better.

- Shawn



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