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Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

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Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#131
post #91

This is strange to me. This is clearly meant, in unicode, to be 'G' that we all know and love. It has uselessly expanded "the alphabet" (to be western-centric) in a confusable way. Unicode maybe should have been three dimensional, with "concept of G" in the 2D space, and "ways of representing G" behind G, along the third axis. All ways of representing G, whether little capital, capital, lower case, would or at least…

> Unicode maybe should have been three dimensional, with "concept of G" in the 2D space, and "ways of representing G" behind G, along the third axis. All ways of representing G, whether little capital, capital, lower case, would or at least could equate to conceptual G in the 2D space. It brings up interesting, long-standing problems. Which of these count as the same letters? * Letters in two languages with the same…

> Letters in in two languages that are otherwise the same, but one has an accent. Is the accent part of the letter? Separate? Are they really the same letter?

It gets worse than this. Example: the letters Ä and Ö exist in both Swedish and German (as an example).

In German they are actually counted as the letters A and O with diaereses above them, and they alphabetize together with other instances of the letters A and O, because that's what they are.

In Swedish those are their own letters, which are completely separate from the letters A and O. They get their own place in the alphabet (second-to last and last, respectively), and replacing them with AE and OE is technically not acceptable in Swedish like it is in German (though it's often done anyway, e.g. on airline tickets).

And in Unicode they are represented by the same code-point even though in one language it is a letter, and in the other language it's only a variation on another letter. What a mess.

Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#132

Web browsers should have an option to show non-ascii chars in urls in red.

It would need a more complex solution than that. For example, this is the website of a local bus company where I live:

http://åbus.fi

The characters are from the Latin character set, but non-ASCII. Highlighting the Å in red would look pretty confusing. And in many countries you want the entire domain name written in non-ASCII characters, depending on the language. E.g. websites in Russia, China, India, etc...

Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#133
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a great solution. Allowing unicode characters in domain names is just inviting trouble. I understand that people with non-Latin scripts want domain names in their own language and alphabet, but there are way too many unicode characters that will confuse people about legitimate-looking domain names. Showing non-ascii in red would be an easy solution for everybody.

> people with non-Latin scripts want domain names in their own language I've yet to see a useful site with Cyrillic domain. Theoretically it sounds good, but practically everyone still uses Latin domains. May be it'll change with time.

Same thing here in Japan with Kanji domains. Although I believe Windows XP usage here is still non-insignificant...

Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#134
post #93

Proud owner of http://gïthub.com checking in...

the visiblend screenshot on your projects page is dead because of an unresolveable dns href.

the screenshot on your kmap repo[1] was dead as well, until i actually opened it. i'm guessing the jpg isnt generated until somebody clicks on it.

enough cyberstalking for me this evening :p

[1] https://github.com/cjrd/kmap

Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Non-latin alphabet domain names do have legitimate uses, although they are very rarely used.

Except by a third of all people who live in China and India. Not everyone speaks a language that is representable in the latin alphabet. In fact, a very large percentage of people do not.

I live in India. I have never seen a non-Latin alphabet domain, except when I opened . and .com just out of curiosity. Could you show me some non Latin alphabet domain names that are used?

I am not claiming that everyone speaks a language that is representable in the Latin alphabet.

Re: Watch out: ɢoogle.com isn’t the same as Google.com

#136
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But think about the poor underrepresented folks using foreign character sets? You really need to support this 'sub café {} café()' => Undefined subroutine café in your friendly and social programming language, otherwise you will be accused of discrimination. Of course the two é are not normalized. Which unicode-friendly language does really check for mixed script confusables? Java only is my guess. Even perl6 falls…

When it is just accents, it's ok. But when your users have a language that uses à radically different alphabet, sometimes they can't even read Latin transliterations.

agree. but then you need to declare your exoting encoding somehow, such as in perl via use encoding 'greek'; and then the parser does not need to guess about mixed scripts encodings on every identifier. there's only latin and greek valid, everything else invalid.

how many languages even check for mixed script confusables? for dynamic languages this check is much too expensive, but they are leading the "good cause", allowing everything, and checking nothing.

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