[cap-talk] Firefox breaks the principle of identifiability

[Ben Laurie]

Mark Miller wrote:
> Ben Laurie wrote:
> 
>> Mark Miller wrote:
>>
>>> Ben Laurie wrote:
>>>
>>>> The use case is surely where you see www.xn--paypal-4ve.com first 
>>>> and assign that the pet name "paypal"?
>>>
>>>
>>> How did you come to see www.xn--paypal-4ve.com ?
>>
>>
>> It arrived in an email.
> 
> 
> Does your email reader render it as a link? If so, and if you haven't 
> already assigned a Pet Name to this URL, then it would generate and 
> render a "proposed Pet Name", such as "unknown-3", or perhaps one based 
> on the site's nickname, such as "paypal-3". In the latter case, you know 
> only that this is one of the sites that wish to be called "paypal". See 
> <http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/pnml.html#nicknames>.
> 
> Reading the raw text of the URL itself is about as meaningful as looking 
> at the memory address of an object; and user interfaces should show them 
> to us about as often. Of course, this isn't currently practical, because 
> we're starting with a legacy of DNS names, and will co-exist with this 
> legacy for the foreseeable future. But any confusion caused by the text 
> in the URL itself is due to the non-pet-name logic of DNS.

And so we can go round this loop again. You propose to "fix" this 
problem by removing all meaning from the URL. How do I then find out 
what the URL is good for?

Cheers,

Ben.