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I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

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Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#81

Post by Klinky »

ballenf wrote: post #65
varjag wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

They didn't claim it wouldn't impact revenue. Just that there are probably bigger issues that impact more revenue that should be worked on first from a purely ROI point of view. If and when this issue has a higher ROI than anything else, it should be worked on. The flow of new issues with higher ROI may prevent that from ever happening. I think every developer can easily name 5+ minor bugs in a product they're workin…

Hopefully there is some good logic and systems in place to actually calculate ROI, and it's not just a PM chasing trends and pushing out new features based on their gut.

I wouldn't say a user-facing bug that prevents collection of revenue is minor.

It's also a little alarming this isn't caught via QA or automated tests. Did this ever work? What other stuff is slipping through? Are we sure the report even escaped support and got triaged?

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#82

Post by jobigoud »

lopmotr wrote: post #76
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They shouldn't have to be though; internationalized domain names have been a standard for a decade now. Browsers, DNS servers and web servers should be on top of that. I mean sure, 10+ years ago they would have used plain ascii domain names, but nowadays they should be free to user their own language and script. At least two thirds of the world population and internet users does not use latin script.

Everyone uses Latin script because too much depends on it. Even "https" and ".dk". Localized scripts are exclusionary to everyone else who has no hope of typing them or even identifying them in a unicode table to copy and paste. A funny situation happens in China where even the most computer illiterate old person can type latin letters on a PC with enough patience just by matching appearance to their keyboard, but ma…

> Localized scripts are exclusionary to everyone else

It's the other way around, not supporting other letters is excluding everyone else because essentially only English doesn't have diacritics.

"Año" and "ano" are not the same word, degrading to ascii only is not an acceptable solution. Imagine for example that the letters 'd', 'q' and 'w', weren't availabe in domain names for some reason and you had to use alternatives. That's how it feels.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#83

Post by tinus_hn »

buckminster wrote: post #24
ricardo81 wrote: post #13

"punycode" does seem to break a few things in userland, but obviously should exist for the web to be more useable in more languages. I've delved into the subject a bit and as someone else has mentioned, "homograph attacks" are a thing. Looking deeper, it seems each TLD has a set of dictionaries and rules for what is an acceptable combination of characters, and what isn't (to avoid homograph attacks)- and as I underst…

Why worry about the dictionaries? No legitimate user will accidentally enter a Greek Alpha rather than an A, for example. If a malicious user does this it won't resolve anyway because the domain is banned by the rules and can't be registered.

This kind of tricks is used by sending mail to users with legitimate looking links, which can be used for phishing.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#84

Post by varjag »

jedberg wrote: post #72
varjag wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume they already have the quality assurance pipeline in place at Tinder and don't need to reinvent it from scratch for every bug report.

Of course they do. But it still takes time, effort, and resources to run through the QA pipeline.

https://xkcd.com/277/

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#85

Post by wokkel »

ballenf wrote: post #65
varjag wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You rationalize dysfunction into a strategy. It's not like they are doing Moon landing there 24/7. It's a simple bug with direct impact on the revenue. They should take a half hour break and fix it.

They didn't claim it wouldn't impact revenue. Just that there are probably bigger issues that impact more revenue that should be worked on first from a purely ROI point of view. If and when this issue has a higher ROI than anything else, it should be worked on. The flow of new issues with higher ROI may prevent that from ever happening. I think every developer can easily name 5+ minor bugs in a product they're workin…

There is a secondary effect here besides ROI: image. In my mind I now link LinkedIn to "not even able to handle a creditcard payment". Get enough of those and ROI gets impacted.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#86

Post by kevsim »

klodolph wrote: post #28

Working with internationalized URLs (IRIs) is a Cursed Problem. Here is the IRI for the Wikipedia page on semiconductors. When you click on it, it should show you a page with a picture of a silicon wafer on the left. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/شبه_موصل Now try copy/pasting that link text into different web apps and see how they respond. HN seems to handle it correctly. Twitter doesn’t, it considers شبه_موصل to be…

So I just tried pasting this into the editor for the issue tracker I work on [0]. When I traverse the URL from left to right with the keyboard cursor it goes as "normal" up to the the last / then jumps to the end, then traverses "backwards" then jumps back to the end. Is this right or do we have a bug? Mixing LTR and RTL is super confusing.

Does recognize it as a link just fine though.

0: https://kitemaker.co

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#87

Post by sangnoir »

kevsim wrote: post #86
klodolph wrote: post #28

Working with internationalized URLs (IRIs) is a Cursed Problem. Here is the IRI for the Wikipedia page on semiconductors. When you click on it, it should show you a page with a picture of a silicon wafer on the left. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/شبه_موصل Now try copy/pasting that link text into different web apps and see how they respond. HN seems to handle it correctly. Twitter doesn’t, it considers شبه_موصل to be…

So I just tried pasting this into the editor for the issue tracker I work on [0]. When I traverse the URL from left to right with the keyboard cursor it goes as "normal" up to the the last / then jumps to the end, then traverses "backwards" then jumps back to the end. Is this right or do we have a bug? Mixing LTR and RTL is super confusing. Does recognize it as a link just fine though. 0: https://kitemaker.co

That sounds correct to me, but there's no canonical answer. The question is, do you want to change keyboard cursor context from "next character" mid-sentence from LTR to RTL? If you do that, the cursor will get "stuck" at the word boundary where next and previous mean the same thing (left is both "prev" for LTR and "next" for RTL - how should the computer interpret that?)

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#88

Post by sangnoir »

mhh__ wrote: post #39
nottorp wrote: post #22

At some point Linkedin changed their site from something that at least worked to some javascript that i can actually watch loading and assembling the page because it's so slow. And you expect ... support for internationalized domain names?

When this happens is it literally just companies trying to save money so they only need to hire JS developers? Or are static sites not webscale anymore? The web framework I use for my personal stuff just takes templates in and fills it with whatever a request requires, and it's definitely easier than dealing with JS wat-isms.

I suspect each component belongs to a separate team (each with its own backend infrastructure & load times).

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#89

Post by mikl »

lordnacho wrote: post #14

Well it would be nice it it were fixed, but aren't people in Denmark wary of using the three special characters æ, ø and å for this reason? IIRC it's normal to have borsen.dk instead of børsen.dk, Denmark's equivalent of the FT. And probably a few others as well, I'd expect any website connected to Århus to use some other similar spelling. Also LinkedIn doesn't seem very easy to deal with in general. I've been trying…

Yep, it is very uncommon to see IDNs used in Denmark, even though æøå are very common in words. As you say, they’re usually transposed to avoid dealing with IDN pain.

It’s bad enough in web browsers, if you try to use IDNs in e-mail, it’s a complete mess.

Re: I failed to make LinkedIn fix their broken international domain URL parser

#90

Post by matt_kantor »

wokkel wrote: post #85
ballenf wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't claim it wouldn't impact revenue. Just that there are probably bigger issues that impact more revenue that should be worked on first from a purely ROI point of view. If and when this issue has a higher ROI than anything else, it should be worked on. The flow of new issues with higher ROI may prevent that from ever happening. I think every developer can easily name 5+ minor bugs in a product they're workin…

There is a secondary effect here besides ROI: image. In my mind I now link LinkedIn to "not even able to handle a creditcard payment". Get enough of those and ROI gets impacted.

This one isn't LinkedIn.

> Had a similar experience with Tinder

But I agree with your overall point.

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