@evan@cosocial.ca indeed I have 😄 the issue's come up a bunch but when @edent@mastodon.social ran a public test, his internationalized handle was accepted ok.

It's confirmed in code (all paths run through this regex):

const webfingerRegex = /^(@|acct:)?[\p{L}\p{N}\p{M}_.-]+@.+$/u;

There were two places that could be cause for concern:

1. My Activity Intents implementation (@benpate@mastodon.social) uses a naive regular expression that only accepts ASCII, but this is not webfinger and is a bug I can fix to use the proper regular expression.

2. Requests to NodeBB requesting the unicode form of a domain will not match, because NodeBB expects punycode. This is compliant with the RFC. Likely browsers will natively translate unicode to punycode over the wire, but uncertain here.

Both of those are relatively minor, so broadly, NodeBB checks all the boxes.

@evanprodromou @jdlh OK, I also got the activitypub.bot codebase (tags.pub and groups.pub too) to support it. The new version is 0.53.1, and the relevant ticket is here:

https://github.com/evanp/activitypub-bot/issues/282

I'm going to go after onepage.pub next; it's a completely different codebase.

#ActivityPub #Webfinger #i18n #GloballyInclusiveHandles

@smallcircles @evanprodromou @jdlh @Edent

We could make things fair by using character sets that are in Unicode but rare in every language, like Deseret, Bamum, or Glagolitic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deseret_alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamum_script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script

That way, everyone is doing the same amount of work with transliterating.

@smallcircles @evan @evanprodromou @Edent the issue is a trade-off between within-culture and cross-culture communication. It has come up before in everything from email addresses to postal addresses. I believe that within-culture interaction is way more common, so we should make that easy first.

Some notion of an alternate, inter-operable address has also been proposed for email and postal addresses, e.g. S42 (https://www.address.post/Home/Addressstandard). We may eventually want something similar for the Fediverse.

@evan @evanprodromou @jdlh @Edent

PS. On the proliferation of SWICG task forces, just musing out loud..

The #ActivityPub Webfinger TF implies a flavor of the #Webfinger open standard. Webfinger is only a small 'moving part' within the AP protocol intrinsics.

A task force focusing more broadly on the cross-cutting concern of "Internationalization and Localization" of the entire protocol suite, might've been a better way to slice related activities.