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Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

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Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#111

Post by gowld »

tialaramex wrote: post #16
jackewiehose wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this even a thing?

There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are very weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated. The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "c…

A+ comment except for this part:

> so this sorts the problem out.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#112

Post by gowld »

downerending wrote: post #48
tialaramex wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of different human writing systems. All of them are weird because they were invented by humans, most of them are very weird indeed because they were invented by humans a long time ago and then gradually mutated. The Latin system is the one you're using here. It's very popular. Most humans in the integrated tribes are somewhat familiar with it‡. It has twenty six "letters" and then twenty six more "c…

Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.) Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.

Citation needed that URLs were never meant to be seen. Every web browser had a location bar.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#113

Post by gowld »

lokedhs wrote: post #95
downerending wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed--this is what was meant by "indices". It's kind of like XML. It was never meant to be seen by human eyes, except in a few debugging scenarios. Unfortunately, that intention was ignored, and now we have a usability disaster. (At least in the case of XML, it can just die.)

I agree with what you said about XML. But in its stead we have a lot of JSON which is several respects is even worse. The worst part of it is that it doesn't have a stable definition for numbers, making it impossible to guarantee you're getting the same value back if you encode and then decode a number. Reliably preserving the data you serialise using it should be a primary feature for an encoding format. JSON can't…

Why do you need a stable serialization for an unstable data type? Use a string of you want stability.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#114

Post by gowld »

WorldMaker wrote: post #74
downerending wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.) Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.

It's another reminder how much internet infrastructure predates the Unicode standard (along with other equally wacky hacks like email's UTF-7). URLs weren't restricted to ASCII versus Unicode for any sort of bug reduction/security issue/whatnot, they were restricted to (a subset of) ASCII simply because Unicode did not exist at the time to even be considered.

Unicode (1987-1991) predates URLs (1990-1994) but not DNS (1983)

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#115

Post by WorldMaker »

gowld wrote: post #114
WorldMaker wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's another reminder how much internet infrastructure predates the Unicode standard (along with other equally wacky hacks like email's UTF-7). URLs weren't restricted to ASCII versus Unicode for any sort of bug reduction/security issue/whatnot, they were restricted to (a subset of) ASCII simply because Unicode did not exist at the time to even be considered.

Unicode (1987-1991) predates URLs (1990-1994) but not DNS (1983)

The most critical Unicode date for this sort of discussion is the standardization of UTF-8 (1993), because HTTP (1989) piggy-backed on Telnet (1969), an 8-bit text channel.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#116

Post by lokedhs »

gowld wrote: post #113
lokedhs wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you said about XML. But in its stead we have a lot of JSON which is several respects is even worse. The worst part of it is that it doesn't have a stable definition for numbers, making it impossible to guarantee you're getting the same value back if you encode and then decode a number. Reliably preserving the data you serialise using it should be a primary feature for an encoding format. JSON can't…

Why do you need a stable serialization for an unstable data type? Use a string of you want stability.

The point is that a 64-bit integer is stable in the language I'm using (which is most languages).

My opinion is that a serialisation format that explicitly makes something as fundamental as the representation of numbers unspecified is not useful as a data representation format.

Re: Add '127.0.0.1 xn–9q8h' to /etc/hosts gives you "localghost"

#118

Post by iso1210 »

wongarsu wrote: post #39
jackewiehose wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd probably had to learn something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_chat_alphabet I always assumed the non-latin-alphabet people know their way around this because they already used the internet before unicode-domains.

In Japan there's a trend to use phone numbers as domain names, probably for this very reason.

Even then those numbers are western. I guess it's easy enough to learn - I'm useless at languages but learnt to recognise arabic and urdu numbers. At least almost every culture in the world has a base 10 system for encoding numbers -- learning Gujarati numbers in addition to your native number system is trivial.
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