On Thu, 28 Jul 2005, Florian Weimer wrote:
Yes, it's recognized by Mozilla and others as the job of the Internet Architecture Board (in particular, the IAB-IDN group) to make a final decision on how to deal with homographs.
Homographs are a classical example of a PR attack. It's a complete non-issue. In practice, people don't use domain names to assess the credibility of web sites. 1/l/I and 0/O are homographs as well, and the Internet hasn't collapsed as a result.
English-speaking folks actually do often notice the difference between 1/l/I and 0/O, partly because they're usually (in browsers) lower case -- hence 1/l/i and 0/o (while 1/l is still close, the users are trained by years to know the difference). It's an implicit Turing-test factor based on linguistic experience. Homographs where the glyphs are almost or completely identical, but completely different code points, is where this *really* breaks down. There are several sets of glyphs that can mimic nearly all of the Latin alphabet -- and in most fonts, looks *identical* to the Latin glyphs (some fonts simply remap to use the Latin glyph's data). Unfortunately, Pine isn't really a UTF-8 mailer, or I'd demonstrate on list for you. However, if you have a UTF-capable browser (chances are, you do), the following should demonstrate identical-glyph homographs nicely. http://www.duh.org/homographs.cgi (Hint: In each group of three lines, the strings of characters are NOT identical, regardless of what your eyes may tell you.) -- -- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com> <todd@vierling.name>