David Leadbeater

Fun with internationalised domains:
Mastodon appears to render some Emoji characters in domains (but not all, I haven't had a chance to dig into the code yet).

If you want to be doubly verified, add a DNS record for "xn--13h" which is the punycode for ☑️, then configure and use that as your URL. See my profile for an example.

(I haven't posted an introduction, but expect more DNS crazy and silliness, some past hits have included Wordle over DNS and Wikipedia over DNS.)

#punycode #idna #unicode #emoji #dns

Nov 7, 2022 at 1:53amWeb
Show threadalarigNov 7, 2022
@dgl Punnycode has been designed for the range up to 0x10FFFF of unicode, which covers only utf-8 encodable characters, not utf-16. ☑️ is composed of U+2611 and U+FE0F so it’s not supposed to work.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3492#section-5
Show threadDavid LeadbeaterNov 7, 2022

@alarig there's no need to involve UTF-16 in this and that isn't relevant here; it's just Unicode characters. The variation selector isn't encoded and is in fact dropped as part of nameprep (I can't find the normative reference right away, but https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-josefsson-idn-test-vectors-00#section-4.1 has a test vector for nameprep which confirms).

Quite likely something added the variation selector here, but it would be stripped on actually trying to visit that URL. It definitely does work!

Show threadDavid LeadbeaterNov 7, 2022
@alarig obviously the character may display as the emoji variant or not, macOS + Chrome seems to prefer the emoji variant. It doesn't really matter here as they both display a tick of some form.
Show threadTerence EdenNov 12, 2022

@dgl that's a very cool domain!

I've got a few strange IDN domains which I'm fiddling with. Always fun to see what renders and what doesn't.

Show threadilmariNov 12, 2022
@dgl That looks rather broken in Tusky
Show threadDavid LeadbeaterNov 12, 2022

@ilmari interesting. There's some changes coming in mastodon 4.0 for verification, e.g. not verifying HTTP links (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/20242, which means I edited my profile to play with that and lost verification), as well as the web UI handling the "@" bug better.

However looks like that's probably a Tusky bug with unicode spaces on top of the web UI one.

require https:// for link verification · Issue #20242 · mastodon/mastodon

Pitch at the moment the profile link verification works with both http and https connections. I think it would be ideal to only validate https connections so that at the point of verification the s...

GitHub