Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

[David Hopwood <david.hopwood@zetnet.co.uk>]

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Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
> At 1:26 PM +0200 7/23/01, Dan Oscarsson wrote:
> >Patrik said:
> >>In the IDNA proposal we have specified that an application which handle
> >>IDNA (like you seem to say that the browser is) only support IDNA if also
> >>the content of the clipboard is converted to ACE before the domainname is
> >>passed to other applications (which doesn't handle IDNA/ACE solution).
> >
> >In that case IDNA is impossible. It is impossible for a browser to know
> >what text in a web page is a host name.
> 
> Not true. ACE names are quite easy to pick out of document content:
> they have the name prefixes.

You're going to rely on the dq-- or whatever prefix to find names in free
text? Now I like IDNA even less than I did before.

IMHO, finding names in free text is excessively complicated, probably
unreliable, and should not be attempted. It *is* practical to define
special cut and paste behaviour for specific well-defined contexts (like
RFC 2822 headers and browser location bars, for example), because an
application can use specially designed widgets for display and editing
in those contexts. Such widgets can also help users to type valid names
(by doing what Dan Bernstein calls "fast nameprep", although speed is
not the main advantage).

Trying to do anything more complicated than that to make cut and paste
work is simply a bad idea.

- -- 
David Hopwood <david.hopwood@zetnet.co.uk>

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