Apostrophe (was Re: Names)

Erik van der Poel erikv at google.com
Tue Mar 24 00:41:15 CET 2009


Hi Mark,

I didn't mention the "side of the bus" as a security or visual
confusion issue. Many keyboards have a key for U+0027, but if users
type that key in a domain name slot, it probably won't work. So
allowing a character that is available on common keyboards but
unlikely to work seems somewhat problematic to me. Of course, U+2019
works in HTML links in an IDNA2003 client, but I guess we need to
weigh that against the confusion caused on the keyboard side.

Erik

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Mark Davis <mark at macchiato.com> wrote:
> A bit more background: U+2019 isn't a security problem for the "side of the
> bus", because if you use an ASCII ' (U+0027) you will not go to a different
> location, you will just fail. The typewriter (ASCII) apostrophe is
> completely illegal, whereas U+2019 is currently legal (IDNA2003), and I
> think should remain legal in IDNA2008.
>
> To be more explicit, I'd like to request that U+2019 ( ’ ) RIGHT SINGLE
> QUOTATION MARK - aka curly apostrophe - be added to Exceptions (F)
> (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-idnabis-tables-05#section-2.6) as
> PVALID.
>
> (Note, the "side of the bus" case has never been an explicit goal for IDNA;
> we are explicitly not trying to solve the visual confusion issue in
> IDNA2008, nor do the changes from IDNA2003 to IDNA2008 even dent that issue.
> We are still dependent on client side detection and warning for cases of
> visual confusion.)
>
> Mark
>
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