Dan Kolis dank(_at_)hq(_dot_)lindsayelec(_dot_)com said:
One reason the IDN thing is so daunting is the work arounds are not that
bad. For instance, you can embed a backgroundless GIF into a web page and
have any ideogram link to a URL. That's nearly ideal in many ways.
Keith Moore moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu said:
only if you assume that people "nearly" always get domain names
(or things that contain domain names, like email addresses and URLs)
from web pages. in practice the contexts in which domain names appear
and are transcribed are far more diverse than that.
what you are saying, in effect, is that people who don't speak English
don't need to be able to transcribe domain names from other contexts.
Dan K says:
Magazines have absolutely no interest in making it possible to enter URL
sucessfully you find in a printed publication. They insert hypens, kern,
change underlining, all sorts of sins in printing URLs. They have had enough
years handling these objects to not mangle them. Your not speaking any
language when you select characters and entering them anyway. Your just
finding the right buttons to press. I've suggested a regime that has some
tricky_to_build slop in it, so you get the same results with or without much
attention to detail. This is only in the context of DNS entries. People
surely have a right to make stuff look as elaborate as they like, the
question is, if they don't to that, do they get punished for what they don't
know how to do.
General question:
Jon Postel got amazing results... Many of the old(er) timers in this
business must have talked to him at length about the DNS. What was his take
on this sort of thing?
Regards,
Dan Kolis