James Seng wrote:choose the scripts you use most often that you like to display normally but otherwise, will display in punycode.
What sort of effect do you think it will have on IDN acceptance and use if companies using IDN domains know that their domain name will display as gobbledygook in an unknown percentage of their customer's browsers?
Punycode is gobbledygook to everybody, but Japanese is gobbledygook to a lot of Englishmen, too. I realize that you don't want to balkanize the Net, but to some extent, the world already is. We don't understand each other's languages, nor should we, really. If we are very lucky, we may eventually get to the point where we can display every IDN in Unicode form, no matter which TLD it is in.
The Japanese have been pushing very hard for IDN. If you take a look at jprs.jp, you will see many Japanese domain names. You will also see that Opera is listed in their news on March 1st since it has reenabled IDNs in 8.0 beta 2. And Microsoft was mentioned on Jan. 26th since the IRI spec (RFC 3987) was published, thereby clearing the way for IDN support in MSIE 7:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/windows/0,39020396,39191671,00.htm http://jprs.jp/whatsnew/
JPRS also has a page listing the various browsers, mobile phone apps and other Internet apps that support IDNs. The browsers are listed in the order MSIE, Netscape, Mozilla Suite, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari. (It's not alphabetical order.) The Mozilla entries also describe how to reenable IDNs.
http://jdna.jp/jdn/browsers/
The following page also talks about the pain of installing a plug-in and that users might not even know that they need to install one (i.e. VeriSign's plug-in for MSIE):
http://xn--wgv71a119e.jp/access/
It will be interesting to see what MSIE and .com do in the IDN space.
Erik
