Some reading on IRIs and IDNs

[colecmac at protonmail.com]

> > It's unfortunate they don't
> > have an implementation, but as it stands right now, most Gemini clients
> > will not handle Unicode domain names at all.
>
> And I'm not seeing anyone else trying to update clients to do this, even
> if in an exploratory nature. What? Are they just waiting for a decree?
>
> [snip]
>
> So when are you going to update gemget and Amfora to support punycode?
> I've heard it's easy to do. Or are you waiting for a spec change first?
>
> -spc (Seriously, I feel like I'm the only one doing anything here)

Yes, I am waiting for Solderpunk. On the subject of IDNs, it seems obvious
to me that punycode will accepted as the thing to do for DNS, and that
Unicode should be sent to the server, but some questions around certs
and normalization still remain. I've outlined them here[1].

I suppose you're correct about being the only one doing anything, but I
don't feel like it makes sense to do anything yet. The solution is simple
code-wise (for IDNs), and so I don't feel the need to experiment, and I'd
rather implement this once, in-line with the spec, rather than multiple
times if Solderpunk says something different.

I guess this is just two different approaches to handling issues with a spec.
Gemini is intended to be very strict and not extensible, and is driven by
its spec rather than what people end up doing in the wild, like on the Web.

I don't think you're doing something wrong or bad by publicly experimenting,
but I'd rather not make things more uncertain by implementing something
in non-toy/demo clients before it's official.

1: https://github.com/makeworld-the-better-one/go-gemini/issues/10

Cheers,
makeworld