[dns-operations] IDNs

[Paul Hoffman]

On Sep 16, 2011, at 1:52 PM, Kim Davies wrote:

> I would not say it is the optimal solution, but what I'm considering for the IANA web site for a future iteration is font embedding. Web font embedding has become sufficiently advanced in the past year or so, that you should be able to reliably embed a suitable font in the CSS of a web page and not be dependent on locally installed ones. The advancement is both in all significant browser vendors now supporting the ability to embed fonts, plus importantly, type foundries finally offering appropriate licensing terms that allow for font embedding.

A more universally-usable solution would be for a zone to provide GIFs of each IDN in the zone. Font embedding can fail spectacularly in many ways for fonts that have lots of characters or lots of detail. GIFs are tried-and-true. I think there are a fair number of text-to-GIF scripts/libraries that work fine with local Unicode fonts on servers; some were used in the IDNconnect event a few years ago.

(I would volunteer to host a public IDN-to-GIF converter, but I'm quite sure it would become a tragedy of the commons in under a year.)

--Paul Hoffman