Starting to implement IDN for libwww and Amaya

Dear Libwww community,

The IETF IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) Working Group
(http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/idn-charter.html)
has worked for a long time, and has mostly completed its
work. The relevant RFCs are supposed to be released
shortly.

Together with Jose, I have started to check how to implement
IDN in libwww (and therefore in Amaya). Please expect to
see some new code over the next few weeks. Please don't
hesitate to ask questions and give comments.

To give you some additional background, the plan is to
accept IRIs encoded in UTF-8 or %-escaped (based on UTF-8)
domain names and to do the conversion to punycode (the
very specialized encoding used in IDN) in HTGetHostByName
in HTDNS.c. On my machine, I have the %-escaping part
already working (i.e. http://www.w%33.org resolves to the
same place as http://www.w3.org). Well, I have to admit
that this was the easy part :-).

Currently, the plan is to either use
http://www.gnu.org/software/libiconv/ as a separate
library or to use code from idnkit-1.0pr2 at
http://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/idn/mdnkit/download/#sources.
The former is probably more straightforward, but the
later comes with less strings attached. If you have
any preference, please tell me.


Regards,   Martin.

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Dr.sc. Martin J. Du"rst

Internationalization Activity Lead
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Visiting Scientist
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Laboratory for Computer Science

200 Technology Square
Cambridge, MA 02139
USA
Tel:  +1 617 253 5509
Fax:  +1 617 258 5999

mailto:duerst@w3.org
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3.org/People/D%c3%bcrst
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Received on Sunday, 23 February 2003 21:16:40 UTC