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.net> wrote:
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






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