5 ms·

> I wonder how many people's RSS/JSONFeed readers we broke with the title... Well played.

xena 4y ago
The ironic part is that I didn't break any RSS readers! I broke URL parsers in chat apps, scp, and for command line arguments to `tailscale serve`.
- dhosek 4y ago
  I have a poem that I published which has a Japanese title (宝石の十字架). The journal that published it put that in the URL: https://www.invisiblecitylit.com/poetry/宝石の十字架/ https://www.invisiblecitylit.com/poetry/宝石の十字架/ and not surprisingly, many URL parsers don’t like the Japanese text.¹ I really need to get around to changing the link that I have in my publications list to use the URL encoded version of the title so that it's easier to share on systems that don’t like the Japanese there. 1. Although, if I remember correctly, URLs are not supposed to have characters outside of ASCII 33–126 in them (and some of those within the range are also disallowed), although as the link to my poem shows, those restrictions aren’t always enforced.
  - RealStickman_ 4y ago
    Emoji domain names exist, so I'm pretty sure you can put anything you want in your URL. Displaying the URL might differ though. https://xn--i-7iq.ws/ https://xn--i-7iq.ws/
  - recuter 4y ago
    Boy do I have news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#Internationalized_ccTLDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#... Pretty soon you'll be able to do this instead: https://www https://www. 宝石の十字架 .jp/poetry/invisiblecitylit (https://www.宝石の十字架.jp/poetry/invisiblecitylit https://www.xn--u9j516hprf6h574cs4w.jp/poetry/invisiblecityl...) Is that... good? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - dwaite 4y ago
      IDNA has been a standard for 20 years. You can already do this. However, they are IRI, not URI, and IRI support is sparse because of its dubious broader value.
      - Kwpolska 4y ago
        “Dubious broader value” is a great way to tell you’re United-Statesian without saying you’re United-Statesian.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - recuter 4y ago
        Note that the second link is a table of Internationalized ccTLDs and .jp is not yet on it. So you can't do it yet.
        morelisp 4y ago
        That table shows whether the ccTLD itself has an IDN form e.g. 宝石の十字架.日本. You can register 宝石の十字架.jp just fine (obviously, if you think about how IDNA works).
  - dwaite 4y ago
    Ahh, that is because that isn't a valid URI - it is an IRI. The space of IRI implementations is quite sparse, mostly limited to browsers (and often rather spotty within the browsers as well). So a page hyperlink or paste into a browser bar will turn it into a URI behind the scenes, but it is unlikely another program or script will handle them. In fact, I believe WHATWG defines that hyperlinks are URI, not IRI - so the generated HTML in this case by HN is not valid. IRI are of dubious value - they exist in a space where users are expected to understand and evaluate the legitimacy of an identifier by sight. That said, this is about the best we have for web domains, so (for example) I think all major browsers do render internationalized domain names in their address bar.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Screw that nomenclature. URI is universal. Banning non-ASCII letters doesn't make sense. I will continue to call it a URL/URI.
    - zerocrates 4y ago
      Beyond the usual ASCII stuff, the standard allows you to have all nonsurrogate characters between U+00A0 and U+10FFFD in the path of a URL within HTML. The standard has browsers internally percent-encode them. It's also dumped the IRI/URI terminology and just uses URL.
jareklupinski 4y ago
my favorite way to plumb an old / unmaintained program or workflow is to put some emoji in as an input parameter, and see where the logs start exploding
- ryandrake 4y ago
  I came here to make a similar comment! A good smell test for whether a piece of software "has its act together" is to send it emoji where it expects text and observe whether it handles it gracefully or shits the bed. It's 2023 and so much bad software still assumes text = ASCII or at best assumes text = ISO-8859-1.
madamelic 4y ago
If I recall correctly, `guake` had/has a downstream issue where the terminal would crash because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency was 15+ years old, had no maintainers, no one wanted to take it over, and would hard crash if it encountered emojis. The build-around was having to fiddle with a bunch of core system stuff (super descriptive on my part) with lots of overloading system packages and just... no thanks. I did it once; never doing it again because then you have to deal with having a non-standard system from then on. Switched to `kitty` and have no problems with emojis. tl;dr: If you are designing a CLI tool, please refrain from emojis.

xena 4y ago

The ironic part is that I didn't break any RSS readers! I broke URL parsers in chat apps, scp, and for command line arguments to `tailscale serve`.

dhosek 4y ago
I have a poem that I published which has a Japanese title (宝石の十字架). The journal that published it put that in the URL: https://www.invisiblecitylit.com/poetry/宝石の十字架/ https://www.invisiblecitylit.com/poetry/宝石の十字架/ and not surprisingly, many URL parsers don’t like the Japanese text.¹ I really need to get around to changing the link that I have in my publications list to use the URL encoded version of the title so that it's easier to share on systems that don’t like the Japanese there. 1. Although, if I remember correctly, URLs are not supposed to have characters outside of ASCII 33–126 in them (and some of those within the range are also disallowed), although as the link to my poem shows, those restrictions aren’t always enforced.
- RealStickman_ 4y ago
  Emoji domain names exist, so I'm pretty sure you can put anything you want in your URL. Displaying the URL might differ though. https://xn--i-7iq.ws/ https://xn--i-7iq.ws/
- recuter 4y ago
  Boy do I have news for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#Internationalized_ccTLDs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country_code_top-level_domain#... Pretty soon you'll be able to do this instead: https://www https://www. 宝石の十字架 .jp/poetry/invisiblecitylit (https://www.宝石の十字架.jp/poetry/invisiblecitylit https://www.xn--u9j516hprf6h574cs4w.jp/poetry/invisiblecityl...) Is that... good? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - dwaite 4y ago
    IDNA has been a standard for 20 years. You can already do this. However, they are IRI, not URI, and IRI support is sparse because of its dubious broader value.
    - Kwpolska 4y ago
      “Dubious broader value” is a great way to tell you’re United-Statesian without saying you’re United-Statesian.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - recuter 4y ago
      Note that the second link is a table of Internationalized ccTLDs and .jp is not yet on it. So you can't do it yet.
      - morelisp 4y ago
        That table shows whether the ccTLD itself has an IDN form e.g. 宝石の十字架.日本. You can register 宝石の十字架.jp just fine (obviously, if you think about how IDNA works).
- dwaite 4y ago
  Ahh, that is because that isn't a valid URI - it is an IRI. The space of IRI implementations is quite sparse, mostly limited to browsers (and often rather spotty within the browsers as well). So a page hyperlink or paste into a browser bar will turn it into a URI behind the scenes, but it is unlikely another program or script will handle them. In fact, I believe WHATWG defines that hyperlinks are URI, not IRI - so the generated HTML in this case by HN is not valid. IRI are of dubious value - they exist in a space where users are expected to understand and evaluate the legitimacy of an identifier by sight. That said, this is about the best we have for web domains, so (for example) I think all major browsers do render internationalized domain names in their address bar.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Screw that nomenclature. URI is universal. Banning non-ASCII letters doesn't make sense. I will continue to call it a URL/URI.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Beyond the usual ASCII stuff, the standard allows you to have all nonsurrogate characters between U+00A0 and U+10FFFD in the path of a URL within HTML. The standard has browsers internally percent-encode them. It's also dumped the IRI/URI terminology and just uses URL.

jareklupinski 4y ago

my favorite way to plumb an old / unmaintained program or workflow is to put some emoji in as an input parameter, and see where the logs start exploding

ryandrake 4y ago
I came here to make a similar comment! A good smell test for whether a piece of software "has its act together" is to send it emoji where it expects text and observe whether it handles it gracefully or shits the bed. It's 2023 and so much bad software still assumes text = ASCII or at best assumes text = ISO-8859-1.

madamelic 4y ago

If I recall correctly, `guake` had/has a downstream issue where the terminal would crash because a dependency of a dependency of a dependency was 15+ years old, had no maintainers, no one wanted to take it over, and would hard crash if it encountered emojis. The build-around was having to fiddle with a bunch of core system stuff (super descriptive on my part) with lots of overloading system packages and just... no thanks. I did it once; never doing it again because then you have to deal with having a non-standard system from then on. Switched to `kitty` and have no problems with emojis. tl;dr: If you are designing a CLI tool, please refrain from emojis.