Re: IDNs in IE and Google

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michel Suignard" <[email protected]>
To: "Stephane Bortzmeyer" <[email protected]>; "Georg Ochsner" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 10:31 AM
Subject: RE: [idn] IDNs in IE and Google


> Concerning IRI, it is not a matter of 'preference'. If you present
> something like a URI containing a host name presented in non ASCII
> repertoire, you are in fact using an illegal URI per RFC2396 definition.
> At minimum you need to have a clear definition on how such 'extended'
> URI (in other words IRI) are mapped to legal URI. This is a big part of
> the IRI draft spec currently worked on. The draft is at
> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duerst-iri-05.txt. The same
> goes for http, and any other URI schemes presented in browser user
> interface.
 
I know the importance of IRI effort. 

BTW,  MSIE/Mozilla seem to support   IRI concept in  "file:" protocol  already.
file: protocol URL had been supporting  NETBIOS PC Name and File/Directory Pathname
in ***LOCAL CHARSET ENCODING***, not in UTF-8 encoding  from very long time ago.
That works in  Windows OS and even in LINUX.

Moreover, Most asian HTML homepages are published in local charset encoding
like euc-kr, big5 and gb2312 etc. UTF-8-encoded HTML pages are extremely *RARE*
in ASIA.

Need for backward compatibility to already deployed IRI-concept and 
Unicode<->Local charset conversion layer may lay another  complexity to IRI effort.
 
Just comparing two IRIs won't be a trivial task, if they can be in two diifferent encodings.

IMHO,  IRI efforts deserve a WG.  I will resume tracking the progress of IRI spec.. :-)

Soobok Lee