Re: [idn] Mac OS X Safari and IDN spoofing

[Erik van der Poel <[e-mail]>]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> James Seng wrote:
>> choose the scripts you use most often that you like to display 
>> normally but otherwise, will display in punycode.
> 
> What sort of effect do you think it will have on IDN acceptance and use 
> if companies using IDN domains know that their domain name will display 
> as gobbledygook in an unknown percentage of their customer's browsers?

Punycode is gobbledygook to everybody, but Japanese is gobbledygook to a 
lot of Englishmen, too. I realize that you don't want to balkanize the 
Net, but to some extent, the world already is. We don't understand each 
other's languages, nor should we, really. If we are very lucky, we may 
eventually get to the point where we can display every IDN in Unicode 
form, no matter which TLD it is in.

The Japanese have been pushing very hard for IDN. If you take a look at 
jprs.jp, you will see many Japanese domain names. You will also see that 
Opera is listed in their news on March 1st since it has reenabled IDNs 
in 8.0 beta 2. And Microsoft was mentioned on Jan. 26th since the IRI 
spec (RFC 3987) was published, thereby clearing the way for IDN support 
in MSIE 7:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39191671,00.htm
http://jprs.jp/whatsnew/

JPRS also has a page listing the various browsers, mobile phone apps and 
other Internet apps that support IDNs. The browsers are listed in the 
order MSIE, Netscape, Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari. 
(It's not alphabetical order.) The Mozilla entries also describe how to 
reenable IDNs.

http://jdna.jp/jdn/browsers/

The following page also talks about the pain of installing a plug-in and 
that users might not even know that they need to install one (i.e. 
VeriSign's plug-in for MSIE):

http://xn--wgv71a119e.jp/access/

It will be interesting to see what MSIE and .com do in the IDN space.

Erik