Comment on Thoughts on Cloudflare
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days agoI’m unsure how that’d be useful to any normal user. Let’s say the UI shows something like this:
A.com Α.com (xn--mxa.com) А.com (xn--80a.com)
What’s the user supposed to do with that information, how would showing the Punycode here help any normal user determine which one of these domains is the right one that they want to visit?
Helping users identify the right domain name and avoid being deceived is surely a very important thing to do, I just find it hard to see how having users read Punycode would ever be a practically useful way to achieve that.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Let’s say that I go to google.com. The UI shows
https://google.com/. No punycode because it is plain ascii. Everything is as expected.Now let’s say I click on a link for googӏe.com. The ui shows `googӏe.com (googӏe.com) I’d be like, holy shit that is a shady URL!
That’s how I imagine it helping, although I am not a UI expert. There could be a better way. But that googӏe.com scares me – I can’t visually tell that it is not a normal lowercase “l”.
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
But how would an average user know that xn–googe-hof.com isn’t the right one?
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Because it does not match google.com
darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
But that line of reasoning presupposes both that the right name is in ASCII and that the user knows this. As soon as either one of those isn’t true, showing the Punycode no longer is of any help in determining which one is the right one.