Re: [idn] Expected handling of labels

["D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>]

Dan Oscarsson writes:
> Much easier for the users!

Where are the HCI studies evaluating the actual usability impact of
allowing uppercase Unicode labels?

You claim without evidence that there's a readability benefit. I could
claim, with just as much evidence, that there is a huge typability loss.
I could also claim that users who don't know Greek will be confused by
uppercase Greek Gamma matching lowercase Greek gamma. ``Hey, this
certificate is for the wrong site! Impostors!''

You say that usability will be improved so much that programmers should
take time away from other features to implement this one. But are you so
sure about this that you're willing to commit the entire Internet to
this decision _now_, with no way to escape if you turn out to be wrong?

IDNC3, http://cr.yp.to/proto/idnc3.html, takes a conservative approach.
It provides safe deployment of lowercase IDNs, and allows uppercase to
be safely added later _if_ that turns out to be a good idea.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago