[UA-discuss] SAC095 - SSAC Advisory on the Use of Emojiin Domain

[Asmus Freytag]

Just go to any news site, and you'll see that they consistently follow 
the scheme that Andrew documents. They have dozens of links in their 
articles and it would completely destroy the readability to provide URLs.

I tend to deliberately expose URLs in key situations: where the link is 
itself the content. Like I'm pointing out a resource, or giving an entry 
in a list of references. Here the focus is on letting people recover 
from minor link corruption (allowing them to easily search for part of a 
URL in order to try to locate a document that might have moved) or to be 
able to use a document even in printed form.

But I regard those as not generally applicable principles so I would 
support not making it a goal for the UA effort to establish this kind of 
practice.

A./


On 5/31/2017 10:00 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 04:49:20PM +0000, Andre Schappo wrote:
>> User reassurance - knowing the exact address of the website they will visit if they click the link.
> But given the semantics of markup languages, you _never_ get that
> assurance.  Indeed, training people to believe the running text as
> opposed to the target of the link is giving them bad advice, because
> this is how phishing wIorks.
>
>> User feedback - Users can visually verify that the address of the website they land on after clicking the link is indeed what was stated.
> If they've already clicked through in a lot of phishing attacks,
> that's too late.
>   
>> I consider spoofing/phishing is more easily achieved with links hiding behind text/images without going to the effort of employing and registering IDNs containing confusables.
>>
>> eg <a href="http://WeWillStealYourMoney.com">the honest and genuine bank<a>
>>
> Or, of course, <a
> href="http://WeWillStealYourMoney.com">http://yoursafebankhere.com<a>.
>
> I don't care how you prefer to do this -- it's a stylistic preference
> -- but I don't believe it is or ought to be part of the UA goals.
>
>> Also, one can use links in a similar manner to the way citations are used in academic papers
>>
> That very stilted style was precisely what hypertext theorists were
> opposed to in the first place, though.
>
> Best regards,
>
> A
>