2013-07-30 4:03, Buck Golemon wrote:
Also, some browsers have odd support for rendering unicode (non-ascii) urls, for "security" reasons. Both chrome and firefox under Windows 7 render http://www.☃.net/ <http://www.xn--n3h.net/> as http://www.xn--n3h.net/ which is the ascii domain encoding (called punycode or idna) of the snowman unicode character.
That’s something that happens after the user has pressed the Enter key to visit the page.
If you just cut and paste the URL into the address box, the SNOWMAN character should be visible there, provided that the system has a font containing it. Windows 7 ships with Segoe UI Symbol version 5, which contains SNOWMAN. And ☃ appears when I cut and past http://www.☃.net/ into the address box of IE, Firefox, or Chrome.
So I can’t tell why it is empty (no character? a space? an empty rectangle?) in some situation. Theoretically at least, it is possible that the system contains a faulty font that has a glyph for SNOWMAN but the glyph is empty.
What happens when the user presses the Enter key is a story at a different protocol level.
Yucca
