Browser IDN display policy: opinions sought

[Gervase Markham]

On 09/12/11 17:49, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> The problem here has always been both the notion of TLD and the
> whitelist maintenance.  The publicsuffix.org list is, in effect, a
> lookaside root list, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable.
> Moreover, what do you do about things lower in the tree?

The publicsuffix.org list and the IDN TLD whitelist are two separate
entities and used for different purposes (although I happen to be
involved in them both). Let's not get them mixed up :-)

>> C (Safari): Unicode if the script is in a whitelist (which by default
>> does not include Cyrillic or Greek), Punycode otherwise. Not sure about
>> script mixing.
> 
> This approach sucks in all the ways you say.  I think it is the worst
> option.
> 
> I think that the right approach would be A _if_ you could get the
> advantages of B automatically somehow.

And ponies! ;-)

> Note, too, that if the root zone expands the way it sometimes
> threatens to, the whitelist approach will become impractical without
> an awful lot of failures.

Indeed. It is with an eye to that future event that we are re-evaluating
our position.

Gerv