RE: Using Punicode for host names in IRI -> URI translation

Searching for xn--wgv71a119e in Bing http://www.bing.com/search?q=xn--wgv71a119e&form=QBRE&qs=n shows 日本語.jp in the results, at least on IE8.
 
-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn Steele 
Sent: monjaj, nov'mber 23, DIS 2009 tera' 15:04
To: 'Erik van der Poel'
Cc: Martin J. Dürst; Larry Masinter; PUBLIC-IRI@W3.ORG; Pete Resnick; Ted Hardie
Subject: RE: Using Punicode for host names in IRI -> URI translation

I agree that "BCP in HTTP, etc" would be too many docs.   My fear is that "Best Current Practice" for punycode use is really "Best Current Practice... in some cases, but maybe not yours."  IMO people should generally follow the BCP and then good things happen.  If you don't, then you risk unknown bad things happening.  In this case, it could be that the proposed BCP won't work for you and bad things might happen if you used it.  In which case it seems more like a "Possible Practice" rather than "Best Practice".  

Perhaps a BCP is the right place for these suggestions, however, if so, I think it would be good to explicitly state that "best" for this particular issue isn't necessarily going to work as often as one would normally expect a BCP to.

My understanding is that Bing does show Unicode in URLs, but I'm not sure how to do a search that find IDN URLs, or if there are other factors that come into play (maybe only for IE7+? Or depending on your language settings?) so I can't verify it myself yet :(

-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Erik van der Poel [mailto:erikv@google.com]
Sent: monjaj, nov'mber 23, DIS 2009 tera' 12:05
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: Martin J. Dürst; Larry Masinter; PUBLIC-IRI@W3.ORG; Pete Resnick; Ted Hardie
Subject: Re: Using Punicode for host names in IRI -> URI translation

I thought BCP was not quite as "strong" as Standards Track, and that BCP might be the right kind of document for "the prudent thing to do"
(currently), since it stands for Best Current Practice. If we had a BCP for IRI issues in HTTP, and another for email, and so on, we might end up with too many small documents?

By the way, another scenario where URLs are converted from non-ASCII to ASCII is a search engine. I had a look at Microsoft's bing.com and it appears to send Punycode to end-users, probably because IE6 does not support IDNA.

Erik

Received on Monday, 23 November 2009 23:08:25 UTC