John Gruber: What I didn’t foresee was the tremendous amount of software out there that does not properly parse non-ASCII characters in URLs, particularly IDN domain names. Twitter clients (including, seemingly, every app written using Adobe AIR, which includes some very popular Twitter clients), web browsers (including Firefox), and, for a few months, even the Twitter.com website wasn’t properly identifying DF’s short URLs as links.
Makes me want to get an IDN domain name...
I’ve learnt, from experience, that’s it’s usually best to use the punycode version of my URL whenever I’m asked to enter it anywhere. The good sites will automatically convert it to the corresponding unicode. Bad sites would likely have choked on the unicode, either failing to accept the input or, worse, corrupting the address.
Besides, once I had the punycode memorised, it was actually a whole lot easier for me to enter. I haven’t the faintest idea how to type my address with actual Chinese characters — I have to cut and paste them from somewhere.
As for Gruber’s complaint’s about Firefox support, the problem, as I understand it, is that not all domain registrars can be trusted, so IDNs are only enabled for certain top-level domains by default — .ws is not one of those domains (.com didn’t used to be either - not sure if that is still the case). You can enabled IDN support for .ws by adding a new boolean key network.IDN.whitelist.ws
in your about:config and setting it to true.
I subscribed to James Holderness' blog years ago on principle as soon as I saw the domain name. Google Reader seems to cope with it now; I always need to click through to the entry to get a better formatted version and the browser always used to struggle.
For some reason I feel very comforted that people have to write software to handle these cases properly. Does that make me evil?
Yes, by all means, get yourself an IDN and share the pain.
I have really stopped caring about it, although I’m still wondering why Firefox thinks my (metal) umlaut domain is too scary to be displayed properly (actually it’s just my family name). Maybe I should officially register my last name using punycode instead :P