412415 - (Persian-AddrBar) Replace Space with ZWNJ in domain-lable for some TLDs

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Location Bar, defect)

Description

[Behnam Esfahbod [:zwnj]]

Dot-test localized TLDs (ie. the Persian one: ".آزمایشی"
/dot-aazmaayeshi/) has been on the root servers for a while.  Currently
there's only one domain under this TLD, which is "مثال" /mesaal/. Now
consider that we have a domain name, which is two of that word in a
row: "مثال‌مثال" /mesaal-mesaal/.  As you can see, we separate words in
domain names with ZWNJ.  This is something like Camel-Case in Latin
script.  We use ASCII dash too, but it doesn't look good for more than
a couple of words. (same as English domain names, right?)

OTOH, Shift+Space, the old standard way to input ZWNJ in
Iranian/Persian applications, doesn't work in Windows.  So, almost 99%
of Iranians use Space instead of ZWNJ. (This is originally a MS
disease. More info at http://zwnj.org/labels/microsoft.html ).

BTW, when Iranian users want to type that address, "مثال‌مثال.آزمایشی"
/mesaal-mesaal-dot-aazmaayeshi/, they use SPACE between two words that
makes Firefox to start a search, instead of handling space.  As
Firefox wouldn't turn that "I'm Feeling Lucky" address-bar search off
by default, I wanna propose to do some regex on entered URL, and make
a replacement for some TLDs, like replacing SPACE with ZWNJ, *iff*
there's a ".آزمایشی" or ".ir" in the URL...

And here are what IRI RFC says (p12):
"""
Systems accepting IRIs MAY also deal with the printable characters in
US-ASCII that are not allowed in URIs, namely "<", ">", '"', space,
"{", "}", "|", "\", "^", and "`", in step 2 above.  If these
characters are found but are not converted, then the conversion
SHOULD fail.
"""

So, I'm asking to handle space in another special way for
Iranian/Persian users (maybe useful for other languages using Arabic
script), based on the TLD.

The regex for checking this case and/or applying the change seems so
easy though.

IE7's behavior when address-bar search is:
ON: Starts searching if it cannot resolve the first label (before first SPACE)
OFF: Makes an alert that says """Address Bar: Windows cannot find
'مثال مثال.آزمایشی'. Check the spelling and try again. [ OK ]""",
which means it doesn't handle it at all, and fails.

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

I don't think that we want to detect the language of URL components and behave differently based on the language context in terms of how we display spaces etc.

WONTFIX for now, please reopen if you disagree.