Eszett and IDNAv2 vs IDNA2008

Erik van der Poel erikv at google.com
Sun Mar 15 18:22:35 CET 2009


JFC,

If you are talking about the plug-in download page, maybe you will
recall that VeriSign intercepted DNS lookups containing non-ASCII
characters at their TLDs, and then redirected the browser to the
plug-in download page.

Erik

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 10:02 AM, JFC Morfin <jefsey at jefsey.com> wrote:
> Dear Erik,
> I am not sure of the Internet and Internet users you talk about.
> May be will you want to access http://i-dns.net?
> jfc
>
>
> 2009/3/15 Erik van der Poel <erikv at google.com>
>>
>> > The percentage of IE6 users who downloaded the VeriSign plug-in in
>> > order to access IDN-labeled resources was 100%.
>>
>> :-)
>>
>> Yes, but what percentage of the users that were redirected to the
>> plug-in download page actually downloaded it?
>>
>> >> I'm not sure whether Eszett users are clamoring for IDNAbis. Perhaps
>> >> the Greeks are, but not because of Final Sigma. They want to solve
>> >> their tonos problem. And I have to agree that ZWJ/ZWNJ users seem to
>> >> be clamoring for IDNAbis.
>> >
>> > How on earth did IDNA2008 become a matter of providing support for this
>> > handful of code points?
>>
>> I confess that I am overly focussed on this handful, primarily because
>> of compatibility issues.
>>
>> Let's hope that if anybody creates plug-ins for IDNA2008, that they
>> implement them carefully and avoid further compatibility problems. The
>> IDNA2003 plug-ins exacerbated the Eszett/FinalSigma/ZWJ/ZWNJ problem
>> by performing those mappings on strings that are interchanged (HTML
>> hrefs), rather than limiting those mappings to the keyboard UI.
>>
>> If IDNA2008 plug-ins start performing multiple lookups, we will
>> probably see HTML files start to take advantage of that. Then, when
>> the browser developers get around to implementing IDNA2008, they may
>> feel compelled to perform multiple lookups too, just to make those new
>> HTML files "work".
>>
>> Of course, this WG's intention is to use multiple lookup as a
>> transition strategy, but if HTML files and Web sites that rely on the
>> "old" lookup don't disappear completely, the browser developers may
>> feel compelled to continue the multiple lookups, perhaps forever.
>> Programmers often add features, but are scared to remove features, for
>> fear of "breaking" something.
>>
>> This is pretty common on the Web. The browsers are too lenient, and so
>> they end up having to support the Web sites and HTML files that take
>> advantage of that leniency forever.
>>
>> Maybe I'm too pessimistic here, but I am quite concerned about multiple
>> lookup.
>>
>> Erik
>> _______________________________________________
>> Idna-update mailing list
>> Idna-update at alvestrand.no
>> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/idna-update
>
>


More information about the Idna-update mailing list