RE: §2.1.3 IRI/URI Canonicalization does not address IRIs with IDNs

HI Felix and Eric,

A quick question, and please forgive my ignorance: it seems possible that

http://www.xn--exmple-jua.org/
      
and

http://www.exåmple.org/

...could be completely separate domains, i.e., one person in the US buys http://www.xn--exmple-jua.org/ , one in Denmark buys http://www.exåmple.org/ . If that situation can arise, then how can we be sure that http://www.xn--exmple-jua.org/ is in fact http://www.exåmple.org/ ? I am assuming that to a domain reseller, they are simply selling a domain name which consists if a string (less any reserved characters), and hence it would be possible to buy a punycoded version of an IRI.

Many thanks
Kevin




 
-----Original Message-----
From: public-powderwg-request@w3.org [mailto:public-powderwg-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Felix Sasaki
Sent: 10 April 2008 07:01
To: Phil Archer
Cc: Eric Prud'hommeaux; public-powderwg@w3.org; public-i18n-core@w3.org
Subject: Re: §2.1.3 IRI/URI Canonicalization does not address IRIs with IDNs


Hi Phil,

I was looking into this section in your attachment:

[
2.1.3.4 Internationalized Domain Names
    * Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) should be converted from Punycode [RFC3492] into their UTF-8 string representations. So that, for
example:
      http://www.xn--exmple-jua.org/
      becomes
      http://www.exåmple.org/.
]

If you have
http://www.xn--exmpless-jua.org/
It is not possible to decide whether it should become http://www.exåmpless.org/ or http://www.exåmpleß.org/ since "ss" in the Punycode string could have been originally "ss" or "ß".
So I think this canonicalization step is not feasible. I'm also not sure if it is necessary: If you get http://www.xn--exmpless-jua.org/ you could process it in Powder just "as is", without trying to go to the representation with non-ASCII characters. The same for http://www.exåmpless.org/ . But maybe I missing something?

Just let me know what you think. Note that the problem of the unidirectional relation between "ß" and "ss" is a problem of IDNs which will soon be addressed by a proposed IETF Working Group, see http://www.alvestrand.no/pipermail/idna-update/2008-March/001343.html

Felix

Received on Thursday, 10 April 2008 07:46:18 UTC