IDN with Gemini?

[bie]

On Mon, Dec 07, 2020 at 09:24:08AM +0100, Côme Chilliet wrote:
> It's 2020, can we please be allowed to use french in our links?
> 
> It makes no sense I'd need to know two weird translitteration schemes by heart before I can link to échecs.fr/français
> 
> I get that we need to encode spaces and other special delimiter characters, but other than that, what's the rationnal in limiting to ascii?
> MCMic

There is one really good reason - it won't work well with existing
servers and clients.

Most servers (and especially servers that follow the spec) currently
only accept requests that provide a valid URI - so a request that
contains something outside the set of valid 84 characters should not be
accepted. Asking for servers to start accepting IRIs is a big change,
and a breaking change in my opinion, one that adds a lot of complexity
for very little value added.

Allowing such links in text/gemini, but asking clients to handle the
percent-encoding in the background has a similar problem - it goes
against what every single client is doing now.

The best solution, in my opinion, is to stick to URIs. If someone really
wants to be able to type links like your example into their text/gemini
files, there's even a solution for that - create as server that processes
the .gmi files on the fly and sends punycode/percent-encoded links to
the client.

bie