519151 - Ñ is displayed as punycode for Philippine domains (.ph)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Networking: Domain Lists, defect)

Description

[Ren² Gabás]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

The Filipino alphabet contains 28 letters, 26 of them are from the English alphabet with an additional 2 letters: ng and ñ. For orthographic purposes, NG is treated as two letters, but Ñ needs to be addressed properly.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://www.parañaque.gov.ph/

Actual Results:  
http://www.xn--paraaque-g3a.gov.ph/

Expected Results:  
http://www.parañaque.gov.ph/

Comment 1

[Ren² Gabás]

IDN displays properly on Opera 10, but not on IE 8.

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

.ph is not in the list at <http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html>, which is the whitelist that Mozilla uses to decide which TLD's are safe to use (which don't present spoofing vulnerability)

- dotPH doesn't support IDN in domainnames
- gov.ph might be different, but the whitelist is only for the TLD (.ph)

Note: http://www.parañaque.gov.ph/ doesn't seem to be accessible outside of the Philippines.

Comment 3

[Ren² Gabás]

I think this is a chicken-and-egg problem. If no browser will display Philippine IDN's properly, then dotPH will not support it. Economically, dotPH have no business case for supporting IDNs.
Culturally, Filipinos are losing a lot when they replace ñ with a simple n.
Should we, Filipinos, simply wait for dotPH to request IDN support for Mozilla?

Comment 4

[Gen Kanai [:gen]]

I have contacts at dotPH.  Let me contact them to see what their stance is wrt IDN.

Comment 5

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

Reporter, are you still seeing this issue with Firefox 3.6.12 or later in safe mode? If not, please close. These links can help you in your testing.
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+Mode
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles
Also, please consider using the most recent Firefox 4 beta build, your bug may be resolved there.

Comment 6

[Gen Kanai [:gen]]

Adding Regnard, Mozilla Philippines community lead.

Comment 7

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The way to get this supported is for the .ph registry to officially request inclusion in the list, as documented here:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/tld-idn-policy-list.html

Gerv

Comment 8

[Gen Kanai [:gen]]

Let me ping the dotPH guys once more.

Comment 9

[Gen Kanai [:gen]]

I spoke with Joel Disini of DotPH and he said:

"there is no support for ñ here, and unless there is a sudden demand
for this, I do not see it happening soon. The local languages (eg Tagalog,
Bisaya, etc) do not use ñ, only proper nouns of Spanish origin do."

So no Ñ for .ph domains until there is demand for it.