Re: [Fwd: Request for Advice on VGRS IDN Announcement]

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>]

Adding insult to injury:
It is not certain that the redirect will achieve much for Internet Explorer 
users who type "bare" domainnames into URL fields.

See http://www.dnso.org/clubpublic/ga-roots/Arc00/msg00691.html for some 
analysis I did 2 years ago about what happens when you type a name into the 
URL line of the IE browser.

Notably MISSING from the sequence is any attempt to look up the name in the 
DNS!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just tried it again on IE 5.50, and got the same bizarre result. No 
attempt whatsoever to look up the DNS name when I type in 
ÆØÅ.alvestrand.com or ÆØÅ.alvestrand.no - I end up looking at an MSN Search 
webpage.

But - when I type in http://ÆØÅ.alvestrand.com/ - the Right Thing (????) 
happens; I get redirected to the register.com website, where alvestrand.com 
is registered (lazy me.... haven't moved DNS service...). So at least 
they're not triggering redirects on third level components.

Amusingly, http://Ælvestrand.com/ gives me a "404 not found" from the 
www.idnnow.com server farm - apparently their service is not only badly 
thought out, it's currently broken....

                        Harald