2007/4/2, Nick Jenkins nickpj@gmail.com:
Probably the one that most seemed like a potential for the list was https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=366797 ( Revise the Location Bar ) which seems to cover not showing unreadable URLs in the address bar, like:
http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%9... ... and instead showing stuff like: http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%9... (and if that URL gets mangled by some email software, it was a 9 letter Ukrainian word, written in a non-ASCII alphabet). But the point is, if you spoke Ukrainian, you could probably read the second version, versus having no hope of reading the urlencoded version. Of course, there are security concerns about non-ASCII alphabets that contain characters that look similar to ASCII ones, especially in the domain name portion, but presumably these can be resolved somehow (e.g. there's something similar in operation now I think for detecting very similar looking Wikipedia usernames, including using non-ASCII chars).
To be honest, from my point of view, as a bot operator/programmer, I am quite happy with this bug. If I want to tell the bot that I have to link to [[uk:Вікіпедія]], I can give it [[uk:%D0%92%D1%96%D0%BA%D1%96%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D1%96%D1%8F]], which is a bug to type, but at least possible. With the command tool in Windows not allowing cut-and-paste, I cannot give it any characters that are not on my normal keyboard in another way.