2 ms·
In the comments, UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it (although you'll notice that some characters are filtered out, emoji most of all). In a
by samatman 3y ago
In the comments, UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it (although you'll notice that some characters are filtered out, emoji most of all).
In a domain name, punycode is the encoding. The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. Also, rendering it into unicode is a vector for attacks. So it's the wrong choice here, where no one wants to deal with the aggravation of knowing that confusables can be slipped into domain names at any time.
- crazygringo 3y ago> The actual domain name, the one you'd need to run DNS and such, is what you see. But it's not something we should see. It's terrible UX for the reasons I presented. I don't ever want to see the underlying gibberish in a context where I'm reading and commenting on the web. This is a forum for discussing news articles from sites. Gibberish is not what you ever want to see. And the idea of being a vector for attacks doesn't hold water. Yes it's true in a theoretical sense, but anything can be a vector for attacks. If the Unicode version of the domain name is safe enough for major browsers to display in the address bar, then it's safe enough to display to the even more tech-savvy HN readership. (Also your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy between UTF-8 and Punycode. You say "UTF-8 is the encoding, so it makes sense to display it" -- but the point is HN doesn't display it. HN displays Unicode characters, not the underlying UTF-8 bytes. Which is the same way you want to display Unicode characters for a domain name, not the underlying Punycode bytes.)
- samatman 3y ago> your comment seems to misunderstand the analogy You're mistaking misunderstanding for disagreement. We understand each other perfectly well, we simply disagree.