International Domain Names in IE7

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Cochrane — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 22:54:38 GMT

I would not have thought that www.☺.com really exists, but it does! Was that intended when writing this post?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Dani — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:32:47 GMT

Yes, www.☺.com und www.☺.net really exists, both are also domain names of my private homepage www.frueh.net.
I would be appreciated, if IE7 fully support this domains. Opera and Firefox support this domains, but also display it in Punycode.

p.s. You actually removed your example. (e.g. www.☺.com vs. www.♧.com) Was ist not good enough?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

ieblog — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:40:30 GMT

Dani,

We get a lot of traffic and are often profiled on Slashdot. We wouldn't want to strain someone's web server or do a DOS on your site (or anyone else's) so I changed the example.

- Al Billings [MSFT]

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Dani — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:49:43 GMT

In my opinion, you can leave this example, I permit this. This is much funnier and more interesting compared to an unexisting domain.
The requests and traffic are absolutly harmless. IE6 actually does either way not support this domains.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Fiery Kitsune — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 00:31:30 GMT

re: International Domain Names in IE7

gus — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:13:19 GMT

try €u.com

A possible problem

Intrope — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 01:18:41 GMT

I'm no expert on Japanese, but won't this fail for some reasonable Japanese label strings? A Japanese text can have characters in several different scripts (including Latin)--I'd be surprised if no one in Japan tried for a domain name that used both Japanese and Latin characters in the same label.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Vishu — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 03:35:02 GMT

Intrope, this will allow native display of a url if the script set corresponding to the label is a subset of scripts used for Japanese language. One of these scripts may or may not be latin. Of course, Japanese needs to be in user's list of allowed languages.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

AC — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 04:03:19 GMT

A suggestion, when a domain is reached that contains a script in a language that's not in the language settings, you should show that yellow strip to be able to add the language.

no problem at all, then

Intrope — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:09:53 GMT

Vishu: sounds like y'all are way ahead of me, then. Good! I'm looking forward to IE7...

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Rosyna — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:29:43 GMT

How does IE7 handle things like http://www.sailor月.com (which is real)?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

codemastr — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 06:33:52 GMT

Perhaps off topic a bit, but will the phishing filter be IDN aware? Meaning, if the URL I enter is http://bạnk.example.com will it result in the same categorization as if I had gone to http://xn--bnk-sgz.example.com (assuming that site is a phishing site)? E.g., does the phishing filter treat the two URLs as equivilent?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Dean Harding — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:00:43 GMT

@AC
That is mentioned in the post:

> Whenever IE7 has prevented an IDN domain name from displaying in
> Unicode, an Information Bar notifies the user that the domain name
> contains characters IE is not configured to display. It is easy
> to add additional languages to the Allow List using the IDN Information Bar.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

claes — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:18:10 GMT

Have Microsoft patented any of these anti-spoofing algorithms? Or are they free to implement in other browsers?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Sean — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:07:39 GMT

When will IE 7 beta 2 be available for download in MSDN?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Vishu — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 23:35:02 GMT

Rosyna: your example url contains two scripts. If there is one language that contains characters from both the scripts and is present in user's language settings, then the url will be displayed as is, otherwise http://www.xn--sailor-183m.com/ will be displayed and information bar will be shown.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Ravi Venkatraman — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 04:13:56 GMT

I wonder how IE7 or future release will resolve the domain name followed by .com in native language, when entered in the address bar.
Example: if someone directly wants to navigate to खोज.com, they may enters खोज.कॉम

re: International Domain Names in IE7

EricLaw [MSFT] — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 07:24:43 GMT

Ravi-- To date, I do not believe that there are any ICANN approved native-language TLDs, although they are expected in the future.

IE7 will perform Punycodization on all labels in the hostname, including the TLD. Hence, the address you've specified is treated as: xn--21bm4l.xn--11b4c3d

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Phoenix49 — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:00:03 GMT

I'll test that function on IE, but only test, no more:), cause it is risky to browse the web with such a browser, and why microsoft "creates" "features" latest?). In Firefox this feature works for a long time.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Jonathan — Wed, 21 Dec 2005 16:59:38 GMT

Well, so much for www.אנקF.co.il and www.אנקP.co.il. Since the Hebrew letter פ can represent both F and P sound, some publications use F and P to differentiate between Funk and Punk. I guess they won't be able to do that with IDNs, which is just as well (
I've only seen it used by העיר, in the "trendier-than-thou" section).

-Jonathan

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Rosyna — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 00:23:24 GMT

So IE7 displays http://www.sailor月.com incorrectly then? There is no logical reason for it to ever be displayed as punycode as 月 is not what I'd called a spoofable character.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

sathsih — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 09:54:47 GMT

Native-language TLDs are provided by minc.org / i-dns.net using their proprietary IE plugin since its not a ICANN approved standard. I have been waiting for this feature in IE. Thanks.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

richard — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:52:43 GMT

To echo the comment of 'sean' on 20/12, can you please let us know when IE7 beta 2 will be available for download on MSDN...

Thank you

re: International Domain Names in IE7

richard — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 20:53:26 GMT

To echo the comment of 'sean' on 20/12, can you please let us know when IE7 beta 2 will be available for download on MSDN.

Thank you

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Dave Massy [MSFT] — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:50:51 GMT

Richard and Sean,
Take a look at the post from Dean at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/12/06/500599.aspx
We'll obviously let everyone know when that time comes.

Thanks
-Dave

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Jeff Allen — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 23:02:43 GMT

With all the fixes going into IE7 now, is it feasible that there will come a day when web developers won't need to do something special to get IE to work with the CSS and XHTML correctly (things like the [IF IE] conditional statments are a good example of what I am getting at)?

Also, with regard to all the confusion surrounding the fix for the * html hack (Holly Hack), does this planned * html fix mean that IE7 will ignore the * universal selector altogether, or only when it is paired with html tag?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

jorgen@hovland.cx — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 00:21:45 GMT

The problem with IDN is that it doesn't work automatically with existing websites using non-ascii chars. People have added the utf-8 version of the hostname into their nameservers because thats what IE is using today, and it works fine. So please tell me once again why we need IDN with ie ?

re: International Domain Names in IE7

EricLaw [MSFT] — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 02:20:49 GMT

Jorgen-- You are correct in noting that IE has long supported international domain names using UTF-8.

However, despite this preexisting feature, the Internet community has standardized around Punycode/IDN as the mechanism of choice for dealing with international domain names. While ~some~ systems have been updated to handle UTF-8, not all systems and devices can correctly operate on UTF-8 end-to-end.

There are some minor advantages to Punycode over UTF-8 (primarily related to the fact that Punycode complies with longtime standards for DNS and hence by definition must work end-to-end with existing systems).

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Viktor — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:39:55 GMT

Hi, I am Viktor Krammer, a researcher in the field of web browser technologies. I have worked for almost one year on understanding and implementing the IDN standards in a free plug-in for IE6 (www.quero.at).

The main advantages of the RFC-defined IDN standard over UTF8 URL encoding is

1 Compatability with existing DNS
IDNA is a client-side extension which works with existing DNS technology.

2 Security
Yes, the IDN standard is all about protecting the integrity of DNS and avoiding encoding ambiguities.

3 Compression
UTF8 is very inefficient for encoding non-Latin domain names. Punycode uses a compression algorithm to store domain names.

I wish the IE team merry xmas and a happy new year!

Viktor

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Viet Anh — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 07:37:35 GMT

I have a comment about process of Attack Surface Reduction

It disallows non-standard combinations of scripts from being displayed inside a label. This takes care of attacks like http://bạnk.example.com. That domain name will always be displayed as http://xn--bnk-sgz.example.com, because two scripts (Cyrillic and Latin) are mixed inside a label. This reduces the attack-surface to “single-language attacks”.

This is a list of characters which are used in our VietNamese domain name.

http://www.vnnic.net.vn/tenmientv/bangma.htm

in order to write a Vietnamese word, one label will contain a latin characters (A-z, a-z) and vietnamese character like ạ (has code 1EA1 in unicode table).

For example

The word "bạnk" has a character "ạ" (ưhich has code 1EA1 in unicode table) and this word is Vietnamese word.

So if IE7 process like this, I afraid that Vietnamese domain name can not be used with IE 7

THank you very much

Happy new year

Best wishes for IE Team

Viet Anh

re: International Domain Names in IE7

EricLaw [MSFT] — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 08:04:09 GMT

<<I afraid that Vietnamese domain name can not be used with IE 7>>

Viet Anh-- good question, but nothing to worry about.

These URLs will work for Vietnamese users, because these two scripts appear together within a single language (Vietnamese), so this is permitted.

As noted, we only block when a label "contains a mix of scripts that do not appear together within a single language."

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Viet Anh — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 05:18:53 GMT

Thank you for your answer

You said :
< As noted, we only block when a label "contains a mix of scripts that do not appear together within a single language."
>

Which stantard do you use to specify which set of characters belong to one langguage. for example, how do you specify set of Vietnamese characters ?

I wonder if I I can send you a table of Vietnamese characters by e-mail. Could you please compare our table and your table and see if there are differences between them.

Thank you very much

VietAnh

My e-mail : vietanh@vnnic.net.vn

Mixing of scripts in a label - color-coding?

Tom Alsberg — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 18:41:57 GMT

While I must say I am not too fond of the idea of IDN myself, for reasons of compatibility and since I believe that it has many opportunities to be misused where it will disturb people, I nonetheless believe that given the issues considered and IDNs used after all, there can be many legitimate uses for mixing scripts (of different languages) in a label of a domain name:

E.g. names which are indeed made of more than one language, or invented labels - just think how many "invented" names in English contain greek or Hebrew characters, many of which are currently spelled with transliteration or just naming the characters like "Omega-force" or "Aleph-null").

Therefore I believe that showing just the Punycode for IDNs which mix scripts of different languages in a single label will not be a good idea.

In order to mitigate/avoid spoofing, how about "color-coding" the different scripts in the URL? That is, using colors to make the usage of different scripts clearly visible to the user?

Internet Explorer 7 could, in the URL entry box, for example (that's my obvious notation, there may be better ones) underline the URL, and if there are different scripts used in the URL, simply display the underline under characters in those scripts with a different color.

For example, a label spelled "<Gamma>toys4boys<Aleph>but<Eta><Sigma><Lambda>" could be shown with an underline, which is BLACK under the parts "toys", "boys", and "but", GREEN under the <Gamma> and <Eta><Sigma><Lambda>, RED under the "4" (if you consider digits a separate script - that is to be decided), and BLUE under the <Aleph>. In this example there are 4 different scripts and therefore IE7 chose some 4 colors for it.

Another example, showing the effect on spoofing: Consider the text "www.p<cyrillic a>yp<cyrillic a>l.com". "www.p", "yp" and "l.com" will have a BLACK underline, while the two cyrillic a's will be underlined in, say, RED. The user will immediately see that this is not just simply "www.paypal.com".

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Anders — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 16:00:34 GMT

Tom Alsberg wrote about colorcoding URL..
At first I thought "Yeah, that would be nice", but the the thought of colorblind and other impaired people hit me. Colors would be nice, but how would you "display" this on for example a braille reader?

Happy New Year
-Anders

re: colorcoding URL

Christoph — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 02:20:17 GMT

>>Colors would be nice, but how would you "display" this on for example a braille reader?<<

You don't really have to, at least not on a braille reader. The problem with IDNs is, that they might look alike or very similiar to a seeing person. E.g. µ = u or paypal.com and paypal.com (with cyrillic characters). But a braille reader will not be fooled by that.

But yes, for colorblind people this might be a problem. At least if there is no additional information but only color coding.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Adam — Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:50:17 GMT

Yes, and maybe they could make bells and sirens go off also. A large flashing red light and a voice that announces "DANGER DANGER DANGER"

But then we wouldn't want to be excluding people that can't see and hear so maybe they could release a noxious smell that permeates through the screen.

But then what about the people that can't smell maybe they could send a series of electric shocks through their fingertips on the keyboard in morse code. "Dot dot dash."

Then what about the people that don't have any senses. Maybe then they could just release a deadly nerve agent through the bass port on their speaker. At least then they will make sure that noone ever goes to a bad site again.

Or you could just switch to another browser. With all the press releases about them and not one answer from Microsoft they obviously wouldn't mind.

Just more smoke and mirrors folks with technology that's already out there and other companies have first.

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Jean Pascal — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 17:04:56 GMT

Dear MS IE Team,

why will there be a notification _whenever_ an IDN character is included in a domain name?

A "normal" IDN should be treated like any other domain name. With your notification solution you will automatically worsen the reputation of IDNs. There always is an effect if you differ two things. The user will ask himself, why...

Jean Pascal

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Adam — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:26:20 GMT

>why will there be a notification _whenever_ an IDN character is included in a domain name?

Excellent question. See my above post. Or look at the definition to "xenophobia" http://www.answers.com/xenophobia&r=67

re: International Domain Names in IE7

Bosse — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 22:04:47 GMT

six people were sitting on a bench discussing IDN's,
- the guy from the competing place said: 'we have already solved it, look'
- the manager said: 'we cant use their solution, we'd have to pay for licensing, or at least it's their solution, lets come up with somehting of our own (but it's not going to be an easy solution because all the easy/obvious/non-complicated ways have already been patented by the lightfooted USPTO), just hope someone follows our standard, lets organize another conference where we can push our solution'
- the programmer said: 'uh, I don't care, just give me somehting complicated to program (I like to program)'
- the GUI specialist said: 'wait, I know, lets use colors, we could warn people if there's danger, we could use... RED, I wonder if red means the same in all countries (whatupp trafficlights)'
- the security specialist, forced to speak/act by superiors said: 'lets make it secure, hmm.. We could warn people if they use IDN'n?'
- the commenter/onlooker said: 'why not pick the best solution?'

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