Some reading on IRIs and IDNs

It was thus said that the Great colecmac at protonmail.com once stated:
> > I'm sorry, but the two languages I work in donot have an implementation
> > of punycode in their standard library.
> 
> Isn't this somewhat irrelevant in this case? 

  It was more a comment about this quote:

> There is an implemention of Punycode in every standard library,
> whatever your language.

  There is *not* an implementation of punycode in every standard library,
whatever your language.  In a lot of currently in-use languages?  Probably,
but not *all*.  

> It's unfortunate they don't
> have an implementation, but as it stands right now, most Gemini clients
> will not handle Unicode domain names at all. 

  And I'm not seeing anyone else trying to update clients to do this, even
if in an exploratory nature.  What?  Are they just waiting for a decree?

> Punycoding domains will
> solve that issue, and languages that don't have it in their stdlib
> can either use a third-party library, or if that's not possible then
> those languages will just ignore punycoding entirely. 

  Poking around the GNU libidn documentation, I found Appendix B [1]
worrisome because the IDN rabbit hole just got deeper with U+2024 (ONE DOT
LEADER) and U+2485 (DIGIT FIVE FULL STOP).  Should I worry about it?  I
don't know.  This internationalization stuff is complex and makes me want to
throw up hands in the air, scream a bit, and go back to the simplicity of
ASCII.

  In the end, I'll probably just do Unicode normalization, then punycode and
call it a day.

> Obviously that's
> not great for those languages, but it doesn't make sense to me to not
> have punycoding at all because of that.
> 
> At the end of the day, Gemini clients must be allowed to support Unicode
> domains. Perhaps the term "SHOULD" as defined by RFC2119 should be used
> in the spec in this case.

  So when are you going to update gemget and Amfora to support punycode? 
I've heard it's easy to do.  Or are you waiting for a spec change first?

  -spc (Seriously, I feel like I'm the only one *doing* anything here)

[1]	https://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/manual/html_node/On-Label-Separators.html

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