[UA-discuss] DRAFT: Quick Guide to Linkification

[Don Hollander]

As part of our growing Quick Guide series, here’s a draft document for Linkification.

It’s here embedded, as a PDF and with a link to an editable version.

DRAFT::DRAFT::DRAFT::DRAFT::
Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Quick Guide to Linkification
27 April 2016



Background
Universal Acceptance (UA) is the state where all valid domain names and email addresses are accepted, validated, stored, processed and displayed correctly and consistently by all Internet- enabled applications, devices and systems.

Due to the rapidly changing domain name landscape, many systems do not recognize or appropriately process new domain names, primarily because they may be more than three characters in length or in a non-ASCII format. The same is true for email addresses that incorporate these new extensions.

The Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), supported by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), is a community-led, Internet industry-wide initiative working on creating awareness and identifying and resolving problems associated with the universal acceptance of domain names. The purpose of these efforts is to help ensure a consistent and positive experience for Internet users globally.

For more information on the UASG and recent development, visit www.uasg.tech<http://www.uasg.tech>.

Linkification
Modern software sometimes allows a user to automatically create a hyperlink simply by typing in a string that looks like a web address, email name or network path. For example, typing “www.icann.org<http://www.icann.org>” into an email message may result in a clickable link to http://icann.org being automatically created if the application treats “www.” as a special prefix or “.org” as a special suffix.

Linkification is the action where an application accepts a string and dynamically determines whether it should create a hyperlink to an Internet Location (URL) or an email address (mailto:)

Linkification should work consistently for all well-formed web addresses, email names or network paths.

Linkification uses algorithms and rules created by software developers to determine whether a string should be deemed a link – or not. Related to this is how people can identify a string as a domain name. While browsers, email clients and word processors are obvious places, there are many more applications that make these decisions. 




Good Practice Recommendations
1.     Attempt to linkify based on explicit protocol prefixes (e.g. “http://”, ftp://”, “mailto:”) but only complete the action if the rest of the string is well formed
Example String

Expected Behavior/ Result

example.com<http://example.com>

No linkification because protocol is absent and not inferred.

http://example.com

Create hyperlink because protocol is explicit

http:example.com

No linkification because of bad syntax (missing //)

http://example.a

No linkification because of bad syntax (TLD must be at least two characters)

http://example..ab

No linkification because of bad syntax (consecutive dots)

http:// 普遍接受-测试.世界

Create hyperlink because protocol is explicit.



2.     Attempt to linkify based on implicit protocol prefixes (e.g. “www” infers “http://www”)
Example String

Expected Behavior/ Result

www.example.com<http://www.example.com>

Create hyperlink because protocol is implied[1]

label at example.com<mailto:label at example.com>

Create mailto: label at example.com<mailto:label at example.com> because protocol is implied.




3.     Map the Ideographic Full Stop “。” (U+3002) to Full Stop “.” (U+002E) (e.g. http://田中<http://xn--fiqx46g>。com à http://田中.com<http://xn--fiqx46g.com>) if string is otherwise well formed.


4.     If TLDs are used as a ‘special suffix’ to determine linkability, then all TLDs must be included.  A list of valid TLDs should be updated dynamically on a frequent basis.



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[1] Note: it might be the case that the actual website requires that end users type https:// instead of http://. If this is the case, then the hyperlink may not resolve or may return an error page.

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