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Comment by drannex | Hacker News Reader

Any reason for the strange submitted url if it redirects to http://www.xn--plankalkl-x9a.de/?

Edit: Looks like HN auto changes it to that. http:// www. plankalkül .de/ Is it because of the ü?

yes, ü requires punycode encoding. The xn-- prefix indicates that.

And because there are way too many ways to confuse people with similar looking characters, the domains can be typed in and converted appropriately, but some webbrowsers ensure that you notice if something is off with www.bаnkofamerica. com (www.xn--bnkofamerica-x9j. com)

There has to be a better way, this is in no way beneficial to normal people. This just makes it even worse from a UX standpoint.

There are a bunch of ideas, like giving different unicode codepoints groups different background colors. That way, а and a show up differently colored.

It's more a UX problem than a technical one, so simple "why not X?" technical proposals tend to be incomplete.

I believe it's also a regulatory problem. Plankalkül on a German site makes perfect sense, because that is a German word. But then there would be millions of ways to form domains that serve no other purpose than misleading the users. So registrars would need to make sure that all letters belong to the same script and make sense i the language(s) native to the domain.

But then this is the internet and greedy and incompetent registrars are a fact, so I am not sure this will ever happen.

As for the UX, maybe displaying a little flag or similar emoji indicating what script it is. And showing a big warning or completely blocking the site of the user has not accepted the script in question. That is for the whole domain, mixing scripts in a single domain should be massively limited and requires other indicators in foreground or background. Also a problem for the color blind.

If you have a modern OS or browser it should show "http://www.xn--plankalkl-x9a.de" in the URL field.

Windows 11, Firefox. Doing the same on my NixOS install with Firefox (showing the proper url). Seems like a regression if "modern" systems are supposed to be showing that eyesore of a URL, which I get could be a phishing safety thing, but annoying to say the least.

I get http://www.xn--plankalkl-x9a.de/ in my Firefox (Mac OS) address bar. I think it's modern? I mean I let it auto update.

Tbh I like the xn-- spelling more, it makes it more mysterious.

I guess it's a FF thing...

Waaaait. I'm pretty sure I pasted the correct spelling and HN changed it. Let's try again:

http://www.xn--plankalkl-x9a.de/

I see plankalkul with the umlaut as I'm writing. Let's see what's displayed when I post the comment...

Although HN has translated the umlauted url to punycode for display, it uses the original umlauted url in the anchor's href attribute. Firefox is happy with the href in either format.

@pg please fix

plankalkül

Just the name without url. Let's see how this translates.

Mac OS, Safari, German locale shows plankalkül.de – as it should be. Frankly I would be rather irritated if not.

This phone runs a rather old FF browser and it works (Umlaut shown) in the address bar. But HN embedded links are shown as raw punycode. Is that a browser or a web page issue?

HN "intentionally" breaks all unicode URLs as HN approaches the tradeoff between i18n and confusability from a very US-centric PoV

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