3 ms·

Address bars should show punycode urls in a different color or perhaps have an option for displaying urls in ascii only (that is turned on by default for englis

Address bars should show punycode urls in a different color or perhaps have an option for displaying urls in ascii only (that is turned on by default for english browsers)

VMG 10y ago
Users will just think it's part of the website branding.
pluma 10y ago
What English speakers tend to forget is that the problem exists outside Latin script in exact reverse: if there are non-Latin homoglyphs for Latin characters that means there are also Latin homoglyphs for non-Latin characters. Forcing punycode representation is a hack that would help English speaking countries (you don't expect non-Latin characters in typical English language website domains) but it wouldn't solve the problem. Also, it's not as simple as "ASCII or not": outside English most European languages use a superset of ASCII glyphs mostly via diacritics or variants. It's not useful to single these glyphs out as "non-ASCII". But these languages too are affected by the same homoglyph attacks as English. It's a hard problem and in the 21st century it certainly won't be fixed with one-off small-scale hacks that only benefit a subset of monolingual English-speaking users.
- userbinator 10y ago
  Given that English, and in particular, ASCII domain names, have practically been the lingua franca of the Internet even for those who otherwise use a different language, I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that IDN has really caused more problems than it's solved.
  - franciscop 10y ago
    I don't know much about the apparently thriving Japanese and Chinese internet communities, but there's a big chunk of the internet in Spanish. I agree English was the absolutely most used language on the internet, but with cheap and global internet access I'll argue that the % of English speakers relative to internet users is lower everyday.
    - Markoff 10y ago
      lived years in China, not a single time I saw advertised IDN domain, they always use regular latin domains, number domains are particularly popular, so don't really understand what's point of this option...
  - pluma 10y ago
    One things IDNs certainly have done in countries like Germany is encourage companies to buy multiple domains. Your company name contains an umlaut? Better buy both the IDN and ASCII versions for each variant. Boom, doubled the sales of domain names.
- MosesKing 10y ago
  Nonsense. For my purposes I don't need nonascii domains. Feel free to use unicorn characters in your address bar, but I'd much rather have it special cased in mine. My security shouldn't suffer just because it's such hard to solve it universally. We don't need a universal solution.
  - realityking 10y ago
    America first! Or, in this case, English first! There's an argument to be made that we should not solve problems in a fashion that only benefits English (or English and other European languages). Generally when that happens the speakers of those languages - which are still the dominant group in internet standardization - loose all interest in fixing the problem for everyone else. The internet is on the way to becoming a truly global medium, if it isn't there already. We need to stop designing for English first.
    - MosesKing 10y ago
      Fixing the problem is a matter of locale. Fixing it for me doesn't preclude non English speakers from having their own solution. How is that English first?
    - Jare 10y ago
      We need to think things through and take security seriously, before we cause more serious problems. We have all seen semi-broken characters and weird symbols appearing in text (due to fonts, codepages, encodings, or plain bad handling of unicode strings) for decades now, and have mostly shrugged it off, accepting that maybe someone else is seeing more appropriate text thanks to that. But security is not the place for such cavalier attitudes. I'll gladly give up my Ñ's and É's and Ç's in domains and other global identification services, in exchange for knowing that It Will Just Work, always, everywhere, safely. And once the "very smart people that really figure things out" have a solution that works with more extensive cultural/linguistic features, by all means put it in place.
deanclatworthy 10y ago
This is a pretty decent idea. I struggle to think how it would apply to non english language browsers as they use so many Latin-character domains anyway. Maybe someone could make this as a chrome extension?

Address bars should show punycode urls in a different color or perhaps have an option for displaying urls in ascii only (that is turned on by default for english browsers)

VMG 10y ago

Users will just think it's part of the website branding.

pluma 10y ago

What English speakers tend to forget is that the problem exists outside Latin script in exact reverse: if there are non-Latin homoglyphs for Latin characters that means there are also Latin homoglyphs for non-Latin characters. Forcing punycode representation is a hack that would help English speaking countries (you don't expect non-Latin characters in typical English language website domains) but it wouldn't solve the problem. Also, it's not as simple as "ASCII or not": outside English most European languages use a superset of ASCII glyphs mostly via diacritics or variants. It's not useful to single these glyphs out as "non-ASCII". But these languages too are affected by the same homoglyph attacks as English. It's a hard problem and in the 21st century it certainly won't be fixed with one-off small-scale hacks that only benefit a subset of monolingual English-speaking users.

userbinator 10y ago
Given that English, and in particular, ASCII domain names, have practically been the lingua franca of the Internet even for those who otherwise use a different language, I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that IDN has really caused more problems than it's solved.
- franciscop 10y ago
  I don't know much about the apparently thriving Japanese and Chinese internet communities, but there's a big chunk of the internet in Spanish. I agree English was the absolutely most used language on the internet, but with cheap and global internet access I'll argue that the % of English speakers relative to internet users is lower everyday.
  - Markoff 10y ago
    lived years in China, not a single time I saw advertised IDN domain, they always use regular latin domains, number domains are particularly popular, so don't really understand what's point of this option...
- pluma 10y ago
  One things IDNs certainly have done in countries like Germany is encourage companies to buy multiple domains. Your company name contains an umlaut? Better buy both the IDN and ASCII versions for each variant. Boom, doubled the sales of domain names.
MosesKing 10y ago
Nonsense. For my purposes I don't need nonascii domains. Feel free to use unicorn characters in your address bar, but I'd much rather have it special cased in mine. My security shouldn't suffer just because it's such hard to solve it universally. We don't need a universal solution.
- realityking 10y ago
  America first! Or, in this case, English first! There's an argument to be made that we should not solve problems in a fashion that only benefits English (or English and other European languages). Generally when that happens the speakers of those languages - which are still the dominant group in internet standardization - loose all interest in fixing the problem for everyone else. The internet is on the way to becoming a truly global medium, if it isn't there already. We need to stop designing for English first.
  - MosesKing 10y ago
    Fixing the problem is a matter of locale. Fixing it for me doesn't preclude non English speakers from having their own solution. How is that English first?
  - Jare 10y ago
    We need to think things through and take security seriously, before we cause more serious problems. We have all seen semi-broken characters and weird symbols appearing in text (due to fonts, codepages, encodings, or plain bad handling of unicode strings) for decades now, and have mostly shrugged it off, accepting that maybe someone else is seeing more appropriate text thanks to that. But security is not the place for such cavalier attitudes. I'll gladly give up my Ñ's and É's and Ç's in domains and other global identification services, in exchange for knowing that It Will Just Work, always, everywhere, safely. And once the "very smart people that really figure things out" have a solution that works with more extensive cultural/linguistic features, by all means put it in place.

deanclatworthy 10y ago

This is a pretty decent idea. I struggle to think how it would apply to non english language browsers as they use so many Latin-character domains anyway. Maybe someone could make this as a chrome extension?