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Re: [idn] Re: converter page?

Hello Simon,

Very nice to put up such a script.

It would be great if the default page was served as UTF-8.
That way, on any recent browser, any user can just copy/paste
or type in their idn and submit the query, without having to
worry about encoding issues.

Using various different encodings the way you do is exposing
your system internals in a way the Web was designed (and is
implemented) to abstract from.

The 'force charset to' drop-down menu is particularly dangerous,
because it does not force the browser to send the characters
that the user has pasted or input to the server in that encoding,
it just forces the server to MISinterpret the octets that the
browser sent.

At the top of the page, you write:
Report problems to bug-libidn@gnu.org, but first please make sure your
browser really is encoding the data you type in the charset you select.
If not, incorrect output or an error is the proper response.

This is heavily backwards. The browser will do the right thing if
you just allow it to do so, and don't allow the user to mess
around with it.

Also, some browsers tend to send named or numeric character references
when characters in a text field are outside of the encoding of the
page. That as such is non-standard, and you don't necessarily
have to deal with it. However, you should make sure that the
output you send back is properly escaped. For example not

$ echo 'Dürst.josefsson.org' | /usr/local/bin/idn --idna-to-ascii 2>&1

but

$ echo 'Dürst.josefsson.org' | /usr/local/bin/idn --idna-to-ascii 2>&1



Regards, Martin.

P.S.:

I tested this with several browsers. With IE, there were difficulties
to interpret the encoding of your page correctly in the first place.
My current guess is that this is due to the fact that you use additional
double quotes in
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset="ISO-8859-1"' />,
instead of simply
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1' />
I might be wrong, but other than that, I can't see any reason at the moment.
(you should also make sure that you properly escape the '&' in
things such as "&mode=toascii&charset=UTF-8").



At 01:10 03/03/02 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
"Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> writes:

> Anybody know of a web form that does IDNA conversion on-the-fly? Something
> that will let me enter the domain name and get the IDNA encoded form back.
> I find myself needing to do do some quicky conversions periodically.

<http://josefsson.org/idn.php>