People around the world need to use their writing systems in URLs. This is important: in writing their native languages, the majority of humanity uses characters outside of A-Z, and they expect those characters to also work seamlessly.
Browsers and other programs generally handle Unicode in domain names well. But not all browsers and other programs do a good job with domain names, and many make the rest of the URL unreadable. For example, consider the common practice of providing user handles such as the following two:
The first of these works well in practice — because it is all ASCII. Copying from the address bar and pasting into text provides a readable result. However in the second example, in many browsers and other programs, copying the address bar gives an unreadable string:
The other side of the coin is making sure that when programs add links to URLs in a predictable way, linkifying the entire URL, and without extending the link to include sentence punctuation. For example, many programs don’t add links properly to:
A commonly used email program, for example, stops midway through:
Others may include the sentence period, question mark, surrounding parenthesis, etc.:
Users often insert spaces to prevent this. It should be automatic:
The new UTS #58 specifies how to format and linkify URLs and email addresses in readable, predictable, user-friendly ways. The data files cover all of the 159,000+ characters in Unicode.
We encourage implementers to adopt this specification for a consistent experience for users worldwide.
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