Stefan Teleman wrote:
> Including IDN with Solaris
>
> Stefan Teleman <Stefan.Teleman at Sun.COM>
> 15 March 2007
>
> 1. Summary and motivation
>
> The inclusion of PHP5 in Solaris has identified a number of
> missing capabilities. One of these capabilities is a generic
> implementation of the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications
> as defined by IETF Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Working
> Group. LibIDN provides such an implementation in a portable and
> platform-independent manner. According to the IDN web page at
> GNU.org, LibIDN is known to run on over 20 UNIX-like platforms.
>
> This FastTrack case proposes the integration of LibIDN in Solaris.
> LibIDN is GNU Software [http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/] [1]
> and is developed outside of SMI. As such, the SFW Consolidation is
> the natural choice for LibIDN.
Actually Solaris does include a generic IDN implementation already - see
LSARC/2003/311. Unfortunately, it's not the API most of the world chose
to use.
(When they came for ARC review, GNU libIDN was suggested by the ARC, but
was too scary for the project team to adopt.)
Also, note the security issues which caused IDN to be disabled by default
in Mozilla, and be prepared to explain how these are dealt with in any
application that uses IDN to display domain names in any context when the
user needs to verify the domain name is a trusted site. (Short summary:
there are multiple Unicode characters that appear very similarly to base
ASCII characters - close enough that users may not notice that when they
clicked on the URL in their e-mail to what looks like their bank's web site,
it was really a IDN-encoded URL using said Unicode characters to appear
like their bank's website when it's not.)
--
-Alan Coopersmith- alan.coopersmith at sun.com
Sun Microsystems, Inc. - X Window System Engineering
