Concerning IRI, it is not a matter of 'preference'. If you present something like a URI containing a host name presented in non ASCII repertoire, you are in fact using an illegal URI per RFC2396 definition. At minimum you need to have a clear definition on how such 'extended' URI (in other words IRI) are mapped to legal URI. This is a big part of the IRI draft spec currently worked on. The draft is at http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-duerst-iri-05.txt. The same goes for http, and any other URI schemes presented in browser user interface.
To come back to IE, it doesn't really process DNS directly, it only sees them as part of URI, thus the concern above. The fact that I am also associated with the development of the IRI spec (although Martin Duerst from W3C does most of the work) should give you a hint that we are not just 'waiting' for IRI. I can't really comment on future product planning (and this isn't really the forum for that anyway), but obviously we are looking seriously at IDN support. For the short term, there are many plug-ins available that could offer partial solution. I won't comment much on your last sentence, at least you put an emoticon, so not be taken too seriously, just a tad irritating for the few of us still trying to make a living writing/designing software. Michel PS. The reason I am answering this has to due that I wrote the presentation linked below. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stephane Bortzmeyer On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 09:43:44PM +0100, Georg Ochsner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote a message of 10 lines which said: > does anybody know, when Microsoft will implement the new IDN standards > in IE (service pack or something)? The technical director of Microsoft France, Bernard Ourghanlian, queried by AFNIC, replied that the are no immediate plans to support IDN, Microsoft prefers to wait for "full" IRI. A more detailed (and in english) reply from Microsoft is there: http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/presentations/unicode23/a6. pdf Anyway, Real Men only use free software :-)
