IDN with Gemini?

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 01:18:07AM +0100,
 Philip Linde <linde.philip at gmail.com> wrote 
 a message of 69 lines which said:

> homograph attacks

Homograph attacks are basically a good way to make an english-speaking
audience laugh when you show them funny Unicode problems (I've seen
that several times in several meetings: the languages and scripts of
other people are always funny). No bad guy use them in real life,
probably because users typically never check the URI or IRI.

And they exist with ASCII, too (goog1e.com...)

> Some browsers deal with homograph attacks by displaying punycode
> directly based on some basic heuristic (e.g. when a hostname
> contains both cyrillic and latin codes).

Which is awful for the UX. Note that such mangling is never done for
ASCII, which clearly shows a provincial bias toward english.

> Octet encoded ASCII does have the nice property that there are no
> homographs, there's no normalization,

This is not true. Since percent-encoding encodes bytes, there are
still several ways to represent "the same" string of characters and
therefore normalization remains an issue.

> RFC 4690 is a good read on the topic of IDNs.

No, it is a one-sided anti-internationalization rant.