Episode Details

A listener noticed something odd: Hebrew in a URL's domain renders beautifully in the address bar, but Hebrew in the path collapses into six lines of percent-sign hex. It turns out the domain and the path are governed by two completely separate internationalization regimes — IDN and Punycode on one side, IRI and percent-encoding on the other — and only one of them comes with a display mandate. This episode traces why the path stayed ugly, from the 2002 homograph attack paper out of the Technion to the browser policies that deliberately show you the ASCII form as a safety measure. Along the way: the byte math behind those enormous Israeli retail links, RFC 5893 and bidirectional text, and whether China or India built a more robust version at scale. Episode #103708 — open it directly at myweirdprompts.com/103708