[Ext] RE: emoji (was Re: I-D Action: draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis-00.txt)

[Shawn Steele]

> "microsoft.com" gets one set of records, the user who looks up "micrοsоft.com" gets a different set of records, but each one gets what they asked for so the DNS is working fine.

Clearly Microsoft would prefer the spoofy name not be registered, however there are other mechanisms to resolve that kind of spoofing, such as lists of malicious sites, mixed script detection, etc.  As you point out, that probably will be rendered in Punycode anyway.  (Though there's another problem that xn-- sites all spoof each other.  It doesn't do me (personally) any good to show me a Chinese site in punicode because I have no clue if I was trying to go to xn-1234 or xn-abcd... bit I *might* have a chance of thinking "hey, I thought I clicked on the tree-like character, not the box".)

IMO, it'd be "nice" if registrars could figure out how to block those kinds of things, but given the size of the character repertoire (and font variations) it seems like there's no perfect solution to the homograph question, even if you confine it to common "letters".

> Because there is no agreement about a standard display representation for many code points and issues with modifiers and ZWJ stacking may complicate things further, code sequences that are different may end up perceived as the same and vice versa, especially if we assume that a registrar and registry who are willing to ignore IDNA and ICANN guidelines or requirements isn't likely to pay a lot of attention to Unicode rules about what combinations are allows and which ones are not, especially when those rules are not easily understood.

I totally get that, I'm just not convinced those visual differences are very interesting.  Very few people can enter a 'heart' character without effort, so I think that these are more like vanity domains for display in narrow contexts.  It might be unfortunate if someone builds an entire marketing campaign around a cute looking smiley on their mac and discover it looks offensive on a normal PC, but caveat emptor (or whatever marketing department is in Latin).  

And if you wanted to build a business around ☃.info then I sure hope you have a backup plan, 'cause nobody's ever going to be able to find you!  (And I confess to being surprised how ☃ renders in my email).

-Shawn