Re: IDNs, do they work? (some scripts are less equal than others).

Richard Ishida wrote:
> Thanks, Najib,
>
> I've not had time to get to this yet, and need to switch to something else now, so I'll have a look next week.
>
> In the meantime, could you do me a favour and run the tests at http://www.w3.org/International/tests/test-idn-display-1 on Safari? 
Hi Richard,

I just carried out your tests. (Results are in red in the attached copy 
of your file)

Result: It seems that, in the status bar, Safari displays all the given 
IDNs in Unicode, but not the Cyrillic and Greek IDNs, and the paypal.com 
IDN. Changing language preference don't seem to influence Safari.

Details:
- As you requested, the white list is the default one of Safari (which 
exclude Cyrillic and Greek).

- To set the language preference of Safari (HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE 
variable to send), you have to set it at the MacOS level 
(System-preference>International)
You can add as many languages as you want, it is the first choice (top 
of the list) which is the language preference of the user interface, and 
the one picked up by Safari as its own language preference. (I've tested 
this by viewing HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE variable sent by Safari with 
different choices)

- For the first run, language preference = en, only Cyrillic and Greek 
IDNs are displayed in punycode, and also the paypal.com IDN.

- Things didn't change when adding the languages (Russian, Japanese, 
German, Greek, Hindi, Armenian, Thai) to the list of language 
preferences, "en" being in the middle of the list. I didn't find amharic 
in my system, so I didn't add it.

:-)
For the story, in the long list of available language in MacOS, each 
name is written in it's own script (target language). Unreadable! You 
can try to guess those name containing some Latin-like chars, but not 
all the rest. Fortunately, MacOS is great, onMouseOver the name of the 
language, you have an alt text with the name in English.

Btw: in I18N quicktips 
http://www.w3.org/International/quicktips/#navigating, it is said "When 
providing links to pages in other languages, use the name of the target 
language". Yes, but it might be worth to add an alt-text in the primary 
language of the page. What do you think?

Hope I've helped a little.

Najib
>  Please make sure that your whitelist is the default.  I just need to know whether each test produced unicode or punycode.
>
> Shoukran,
>   
Marhabane.
> RI
>   
-- 
Najib TOUNSI (mailto:tounsi @ w3.org)
Bureau W3C au Maroc (http://www.w3c.org.ma/)
Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingenieurs, BP 765 Agdal-RABAT Maroc (Morocco)
Phone : +212 (0) 37 68 71 50 (P1711)  Fax : +212 (0) 37 77 88 53
Mobile: +212 (0) 61 22 00 30