Unicode vs. the World

[Björn Wärmedal]

> I don't think this is going to be acceptable for authors.

Maybe not. I don’t really know.

> It's
> unreasonable to ask authors to use a tool other than their favorite text
> editor to write gemtext.

Is it? Unreasonable is a strong word here.

I assume there would be some servers out there that would do this on the fly when serving gemtext, but I can’t know that for sure. There could also be a CLI tool you can run on your file that fixes links. Or some other solution.

> Why is it reasonable for the client to have to
> punycode the domain (an uncommon encoding for which not every common
> language has a library),

I made the assumption that most languages dealing in stuff like URLs would have support for it. I may be in the wrong there. I also made the assumption that punycoding was common, but I may be in the wrong there too. Which method *is* common?

> but unreasonable for it to have to urlencode
> the path (a common encoding for which libraries are ubiquitous)?

Because — as I tried to point out — there is no reasonably simple heuristic for determining whether a URL is already percent encoded or not. And percent encoding a URL that is already percent encoded exchanges all % characters with %25. Attempting to punycode a domain name that is already punycoded, however, changes nothing at all. No heuristics are needed, the client can just punycode everything.

> Why is
> it so hard to convince people to just do the right thing?

Why are you so adamantly convinced that *you* are arguing for ”the right thing”? Is there an objective measurement here that you may share with me?

🦤🐬🦄🐇