Stop me if I've misunderstood...

[Gervase Markham]

I must confess that I've not had time recently to follow carefully the 
discussions about mappings. If that means that some people consign this 
message to the bit bucket, so be it.

At the moment, standard domain names have what I'll call "bus-ability" - 
that is, if you see them in an advert on the side of a bus, you can 
write them down, type them into any web browser or other domain 
name-using client later, and you'll end up at the place intended by the 
creator of the advertisement. IDN domain names under the current version 
of IDN have, as far as I understand it, pretty much the same 
"bus-ability" property. In the IDN case, what the user types has to be 
first normalized, and then converted to punycode. The user in no way 
needs to know or care about this extra technical complexity. It just works.

I would assert that this property is pretty key to keeping the web 
working in a sane and, importantly, secure manner. People convert domain 
names from print/voice/memory to computer and back all the time.

If the standards were to change in such a way that it becomes quite 
legal and conforming that typing a set of characters into browser A 
takes you to website Q, but typing the same set into browser B takes you 
to website R, I would politely suggest that those who wrote the new 
standards had taken leave of their senses. This is a recipe for chaos. 
And phishing.

This incredible outcome is not a serious possibility, is it?

Gerv