I'm not sure if one web site is as much an indication of a country's policy as it is a lack of QA and planning :)
That said, look at what comes over the wire when you hit the original URL in Chrome
Location: /tsa-pre%E2%9C%93%E2%84%A2
And the resulting request:
http://www.tsa.gov/tsa-pre%E2%9C%93%E2%84%A2
It looks like Chrome is the one turning things back to a unicode character. TSA is following the rules -- if it's not displayable in the us ascii character set, url encode it. But anything goes in a URL.
Sean
On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Adam Thompson athompso@athompso.netwrote:
Apparently even the American federal government doesn't think it needs to be limited to the ASCII character set any more...
Go to http://www.tsa.gov/expedited-screening and take a close look at the URL it redirects you to. See attached screenshots of Chrome, Mozilla and IE under Win7 for a great illustration of why you shouldn't do this.
ARGH.
Oh, and the icing on the cake is that their website won't *quite* fit into a 1024-pixel-wide browser window. Travelers with 14" laptop screens are apparently no longer expected to visit the USA!
-Adam Thompson athompso@athompso.net
Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable