Re: Google Wants to Kill the URL

Do people really type in URLs? I'd wager that most people go via Google
(sorry...I mean they go via "their favourite search engine").

Even your URL in your signature, Larry...I can't actually imagine myself
typing that; if I didn't click on it I'd just go search for your name and
click the top result!

So perhaps the issues raised by John amount to whether some fraudster could
convince me that I've found your site:

* first by getting their site into your search results;
* and then second, after I've clicked the URL by making the site look ok,
having certificates, etc.

Whichever way you look at it, it doesn't seem to be a problem with URLs per
se (unless we think there is a problem with binary and electricity, too),
but with the layers that are placed on top of them.

On Thu, 6 Sep 2018 at 05:33 Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com> wrote:

> A lot of the problems with URLs have to do with i18n and the difficulty of
> defining canonical forms that capture the equivalence wanted.
>
> Briefly, I thought it might be good to focus on retypeability – when
> displaying a URL can a user enter it and get the same string?
>
> If you expect a person to compare two strings, they are more likely to be
> able to do so if both are retypeable.
>
> Retypeability handles lots of the Unicode problems (normalization of
> combining character substrings, han unification, emoji, zero-width joiners,
> etc etc.)
>
>
>
> Strings that are not retypeable are “confusable”. Confusable strings are
> generally NOT generated but chosen – a domain name or a path of a URL.
>
> Happy to talk more if you like,
>
>
>
> An interesting approximation to retypeability is to render the string as
> an image and then OCR the result.
>
>
>
> Larry
>
> --
>
> https://LarryMasinter.net
>
>
>