Re: [idn] URL encoding in html page

["Soobok Lee" <lsb@postel.co.kr>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Thomson" <bthomson@fm-net.ne.jp>
To: "Soobok Lee" <lsb@postel.co.kr>; "IETF idn working group" <idn@ops.ietf.org>
Sent: Friday, March 22, 2002 6:29 PM
Subject: Re: [idn] URL encoding in html page


> > What if all the html viewable text is in english, but, only the href url contains
> > legacy (korean) encoded hostnames?  chinese visitors would see clean english homepage,
> > but fail to click through the korean link.
> >
> Well, that could happen, but a META tag would solve that so easily. Personally
> I often use a simple text editor to deal with HTML, and would find it easier to
> use legacy encodings or UTF-8 than cut-and-paste ACE from somewhere.
> Of course the user could do it either way and it would work.

Yes. Charset META tags help. But, many homepages  have assumptions on the main audience's
default char encodings and very often omit the  META tag for the encoding like :
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=euc-kr">

Moreover, IDN url would be used in a pure FRAMESET document that defines frame URLs
and contains no viewable texts. Such FRAMESET documents often omit charset META tags.
 (look into the html source of http://www.freeway.co.kr/ )

AFIAK, 99.99999% of korean homepages have implicit/explicit
legacy korean encoding (KS_C_5601-1987 or euc-kr). So do most japanese/chineses homepages.
UTF8/UCS-2 encodings are rarely used in global WEB publishing.  Legacy encodings
will dominates even in the future, because it is compact and inexpensive.

IF we want to make IDN truly internationally interoperable, all IDN-aware webbrowsers/applications
should contain libaries of all kinds of legacy-to-Unicode conversion routines. It will burden
too much memory load on handheld devices like PDA.

Moreover, legacy encodings are revised separately from unicode. We may face with as toughest
versioning problems as we did in stringprep/nameprep versioning problems for newly added unicode points.
How to guarantee  stability and intergrity of IDN operations in the all combinations of  numerous kinds and versions of iDN-aware
applications and legacy encodings?

Soobok Lee