[UA-discuss] Fwd: [DENICpublic-l] Thunderbird 45 Now Also IDNA-Compatible Due To DENIC Source Code Donation

Frank Michlick frank at domaincocoon.com
Wed Apr 27 12:46:54 UTC 2016


All it takes is a donation... FYI.


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	[DENICpublic-l] Thunderbird 45 Now Also IDNA-Compatible Due To
DENIC Source Code Donation
Date: 	Wed, 27 Apr 2016 09:25:49 +0200
From: 	DENIC Presse <presse at denic.de>
To: 	Public-l at denic.de



Dear Sir or Madam,

DENIC has contributed part of the code for the new version 45 of the
free e-mail client Mozilla Thunderbird
(https://www.mozilla.org/en-GB/thunderbird/), which was launched in
mid-April 2016: Thanks to this donation to the open-source community,
Thunderbird now for the first time supports, besides numerous other
novel functions, certain special characters (Internationalized Domain
Names, IDNs) such as the German letter "Eszett" (ß) in e-mail addresses.

Up to now, if the domain part of an e-mail address (i.e. the part after
the [at] sign) contained the letter "ß", this letter has been converted
automatically to the character string "ss", despite mail programs having
been able to handle this special character since August 2010 in theory.
At that time, the Internet Standard for Internationalized Domain Names
in Applications (IDNA2008) had been adapted correspondingly by the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

DENIC, too, had included the "Eszett" more than five years ago in the
set of characters permitted for .de domains already. However, to date
the practicality of this had been limited due to the lack of support by
web browsers and e-mail applications.

The DENIC-coded novelty in Thunderbird 45 is also of benefit to the
users of other language families which are not based on Latin
characters: In fact it paved the way for the entire range of characters
under IDNA2008 to be fully available in Thunderbird starting as of now.
Additionally, various characters from Greek, Farsi and Sinhala, for
which re-routing has taken place so far, are now able to be resolved as
characters in domains in their own right.

Overall, the IDNA2008 standard, which is based on the Unicode character
set, allows the coding of thousands of new characters from various
script systems. As a result, tens of thousands of characters from a
multitude of different script systems may be used actively in Internet
browsers and e-mail applications, provided that the required client
support is available. On DENIC’s website, we provide a list of
programs that are currently IDNA-capable
(https://www.denic.de/en/know-how/idn-domains/idn-capable-software/).

*/Donated IDNA Source Code Earlier Implemented in Firefox 45 Already/*

Already since the start of March, the latest version of the Mozilla
browser Firefox (Firefox 45) has been using the IDNA source code donated
by DENIC
(https://www.denic.de/en/whats-new/news/article/denic-contributes-source-code-for-the-use-of-the-german-letter-eszett-ss-in-firefox-45/)
and thus enables Internet users to access domains that contain certain
special characters such as the German letter "Eszett" (ß). For the time
being, the new code cannot yet be used in the Firefox application for
Android. This is due to the particularities of the Google platform.

A very prompt reaction to the launch of the IDNA standard came at that
time from the developers of the Libidn2 library, which serves to code
and decode internationalized domain names: They implemented the revised
algorithm of the IDNA standard on the basis of a corresponding source
code donation by DENIC as early as in 2011.


Kind regards

Stefanie Welters
Public Relations
-- 

DENIC eG, Kaiserstraße 75 - 77, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, GERMANY
E-Mail: presse at denic.de, Fon: +49 69 27235-274, Fax: -235
https://www.denic.de <https://www.denic.de/>

Angaben nach § 25a Absatz 1 GenG:
DENIC eG (Sitz: Frankfurt am Main)
Vorstand: Helga Krüger, Andreas Musielak, Carsten Schiefner, Dr. Jörg
Schweiger
Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Thomas Keller
Eingetragen unter Nr. 770 im Genossenschaftsregister, Amtsgericht
Frankfurt am Main



More information about the UA-discuss mailing list