Distributed configuration of "private" IDNA (Re: IDNA and getnameinfo() and getaddrinfo())

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Fri Jun 18 00:56:28 CEST 2010


> If a user e-mails another a URL using an IDN encoded in UTF-8, 
> and the receipient tries to load it with FF, and the namespace in
> question uses UTF-8 instead of IDNA ACE encoding, will the FF
> user be able to load that URL?

It should, the OS sends the request to whatever your default browser is in Unicode, the browser better be able to correctly handle the link.  AFAIK there's no big problems in this area in Windows (maybe some edge cases).  Since we use *W APIs for everything, most of these scenarios work.  Problem is only if the client doesn't know how to punycode, or if punycode gets injected unexpectedly into the *W API calls, or if there's some other protocol dependency that hasn't been updated beyond ASCII.

> What about URLs with such IDNs embedded in HTML served by
> servers in that namespace?

Href="http://non-ascii" generally works in most browsers, HTML has a code page, so this isn't ambiguous (unless the code page is wrong or missing).

-Shawn


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