Re: Re: converter page?

Simon,

Let me make one additional suggestion, which is sort of 
orthogonal to Martin's...  It would be useful, as an alternative 
to UTF-8 and the other encodings you support, to be able to put 
in a string of characters as a list of items in U+nnnn form. 
You show that form in your debugging option, but, if the 
characters going in don't match what you produce, there is no 
obvious way to provide them.  I'm particularly concerned here 
about characters my browser has no way to render (e.g., 
appropriate fonts not installed, etc.)

The script/web page itself is much appreciated.

thanks,
    john


--On Saturday, 08 March, 2003 15:31 -0500 Martin Duerst 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello Simon,
>
> Very nice to put up such a script.
>
> It would be great if the default page was served as UTF-8.
> That way, on any recent browser, any user can just copy/paste
> or type in their idn and submit the query, without having to
> worry about encoding issues.
>
> Using various different encodings the way you do is exposing
> your system internals in a way the Web was designed (and is
> implemented) to abstract from.
>
> The 'force charset to' drop-down menu is particularly
> dangerous, because it does not force the browser to send the
> characters that the user has pasted or input to the server in
> that encoding, it just forces the server to MISinterpret the
> octets that the browser sent.
>
> At the top of the page, you write:
>     Report problems to [email protected], but first please
> make sure your     browser really is encoding the data you
> type in the charset you select.     If not, incorrect output
> or an error is the proper response.
>
> This is heavily backwards. The browser will do the right thing
> if you just allow it to do so, and don't allow the user to mess
> around with it.
>
> Also, some browsers tend to send named or numeric character
> references when characters in a text field are outside of the
> encoding of the page. That as such is non-standard, and you
> don't necessarily have to deal with it. However, you should
> make sure that the output you send back is properly escaped.
> For example not
>
> $ echo 'D&uuml;rst.josefsson.org' | /usr/local/bin/idn
> --idna-to-ascii 2>&1
>
> but
>
> $ echo 'D&amp;uuml;rst.josefsson.org' | /usr/local/bin/idn
> --idna-to-ascii 2>&amp;1
>
>
>
> Regards,    Martin.
>
> P.S.:
>
> I tested this with several browsers. With IE, there were
> difficulties to interpret the encoding of your page correctly
> in the first place. My current guess is that this is due to
> the fact that you use additional double quotes in
> <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;
> charset="ISO-8859-1"' />, instead of simply
> <meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html;
> charset=ISO-8859-1' /> I might be wrong, but other than that,
> I can't see any reason at the moment. (you should also make
> sure that you properly escape the '&' in things such as
> "&mode=toascii&charset=UTF-8").
>
>
>
> At 01:10 03/03/02 +0100, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>> "Eric A. Hall" <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>> > Anybody know of a web form that does IDNA conversion
>> > on-the-fly? Something that will let me enter the domain
>> > name and get the IDNA encoded form back. I find myself
>> > needing to do do some quicky conversions periodically.
>>
>> <http://josefsson.org/idn.php>
>
>