Network.IDN testbed
Background
When Mozilla’s IDN support was first being developed, the standard itself had not completely stabilized. As such, there were no domain registrars that offered IDN domains, and if one was to register a domain based on the then-current state of the standard, there was no guarantee it would work by the time the standard was finalized. The initial checkin for IDN support contained this preference, which affects conversions from UTF8 (Unicode) to ACE (punycode). The alteration simply appends a string to the end of the conversion, but this would allow developers to “catch” IDNs for testing.
This preference is largely for debugging purposes.
Possible values and their effects
True
When converting a Unicode string to punycode, append “mltbd.” to the string.
False
Convert Unicode to punycode normally. (Default)
Caveats
- Unless you’re actually modifying or testing Mozilla’s IDN code, there’s no reason to set this preference to true. Doing so will break normal IDN functionality.
First checked in
Has an effect in
- Netscape (all versions since 7.1)
- Mozilla Suite (all versions since 1.3 Beta)
- Mozilla Firebird (all versions)
- Mozilla Firefox (all versions)
- SeaMonkey (all versions)
Related bugs
Related preferences
- network.IDN_prefix
- network.IDN_show_punycode
- network.IDN.blacklist_chars
- network.IDN.whitelist.*
- network.enableIDN
External links
- Internationalized domain name - Wikipedia
- RFC 3492 - Punycode: A bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications
