Re: [idn] quick & dirty (but not too dirty) homograph defense

[Erik van der Poel <erik@vanderpoel.org>]

Erik van der Poel wrote:
> I'm probably missing something, but if the apps are not currently 
> warning the user when characters from blocks that ought to be banned 
> appear, then people and/or tools may be generating references (e.g. HTML 
> documents) to those characters, without realizing that those characters 
> are being mapped to some other base characters, which then work OK in 
> the DNS lookup.
>
> Maybe it is unlikely that a lot of such references would come to exist, 
> and it wouldn't be such a burden to the user of a new app to see the 
> occasional error e.g. when they click on such a link.
>
> But how do you determine how many HTML documents contain bad characters 
> in their links, and how do you decide that that number is low enough to 
> make such a change to the spec?
>
> So I'm wondering if you would really be able to state that such a change 
> "would largely impact what can be registered".

Sorry, this last part is a mistake. Banning characters that were 
previously mapped to others does *not* affect what can be registered. Duh.

But please consider the other parts of my email.

Erik