Re: [idn] who should be doing IDN filtering

[Martin Duerst <duerst@w3.org>]

Hello Eric,


At 06:40 05/02/18, Erik van der Poel wrote:

>Yes, but as a browser developer, I *would* care about whether a user was 
able to easily type in a domain name and go where s/he wanted to go. In the 
presence of these homograph problems, a browser developer might even want 
to retry DNS lookups with different character codes until it succeeded. We 
can't just foist these solvable problems on the end-user.

As a browser developer, you don't even have to care too much about
ease of typing, above and beyond making sure that the user can use
the input facilities provided by the OS and Windowing system,...
in the usual way.

The rest will be taken care by registrants, they'll figure out
sooner or later what names are easy to type and what names are
not easy to type. It has worked quite well for the ASCII-only
DNS.


>You could use a prefix other than xn-- to migrate from the old to the 
new. I jotted down a few quick ideas here:
>
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2005JanMar/0101.html
>
>However, if I can't get support from the major organizations such as 
Microsoft, VeriSign and the Unicode Consortium (either because too many 
xn-- names have already been registered and the migration would not be 
practical or for some other reason), then I might just give up on this 
idea. But I'm willing to explore it some more.

[rethorical question:]
Are we also going to deal with those cases in US-ASCII that can
be confusing now?


Later, Martin v. Loevis wrote:
> The most natural keyboard input in this case is the apparent
> script of the label. The user should see the script from reading
> it

Yes. And some labels where the script isn't clear enough might
not get registered by honest folks because they want users to
understand how to type things, rather than to worry what
script to use. An alternative may of course be registering
in both scripts.
[the number of cases that this applies are probably not
large, I'm mainly thinking about short words or company
names/acronyms in Russian and similar places]


Regards,   Martin.