Apigee posted this lovely picture over at twitter. A curl command line on the NASDAQ tower.
The state and rate of HTTP/2 adoption
The protocol HTTP/2 as defined in the draft-17 was approved by the IESG and is being implemented and deployed widely on the Internet today, even before it has turned up as an actual RFC. Back in February, already upwards 5% or maybe even more of the web traffic was using HTTP/2.
My prediction: We’ll see >10% usage by the end of the year, possibly as much as 20-30% a little depending on how fast some of the major and most popular platforms will switch (Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Yahoo and others). In 2016 we might see HTTP/2 serve a majority of all HTTP requests – done by browsers at least.
Counted how? Yeah the second I mention a rate I know you guys will start throwing me hard questions like exactly what do I mean. What is Internet and how would I count this? Let me express it loosely: the share of HTTP requests (by volume of requests, not by bandwidth of data and not just counting browsers). I don’t know how to measure it and we can debate the numbers in December and I guess we can all end up being right depending on what we think is the right way to count!
Who am I to tell? I’m just a person deeply interested in protocols and HTTP/2, so I’ve been involved in the HTTP work group for years and I also work on several HTTP/2 implementations. You can guess as well as I, but this just happens to be my blog!
The HTTP/2 Implementations wiki page currently lists 36 different implementations. Let’s take a closer look at the current situation and prospects in some areas.
Browsers
Firefox and Chome have solid support since a while back. Just use a recent version and you’re good.
Internet Explorer has been shown in a tech preview that spoke HTTP/2 fine. So, run that or wait for it to ship in a public version soon.
There are no news about this from Apple regarding support in Safari. Give up on them and switch over to a browser that keeps up!
Other browsers? Ask them what they do, or replace them with a browser that supports HTTP/2 already.
My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading browsers with a market share way over 50% combined will support HTTP/2.
Server software
Apache HTTPd is still the most popular web server software on the planet. mod_h2 is a recent module for it that can speak HTTP/2 – still in “alpha” state. Give it time and help out in other ways and it will pay off.
Nginx has told the world they’ll ship HTTP/2 support by the end of 2015.
IIS was showing off HTTP/2 in the Windows 10 tech preview.
H2O is a newcomer on the market with focus on performance and they ship with HTTP/2 support since a while back already.
nghttp2 offers a HTTP/2 => HTTP/1.1 proxy (and lots more) to front your old server with and can then help you deploy HTTP/2 at once.
Apache Traffic Server supports HTTP/2 fine. Will show up in a release soon.
Also, netty, jetty and others are already on board.
HTTPS initiatives like Let’s Encrypt, helps to make it even easier to deploy and run HTTPS on your own sites which will smooth the way for HTTP/2 deployments on smaller sites as well. Getting sites onto the TLS train will remain a hurdle and will be perhaps the single biggest obstacle to get even more adoption.
My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading HTTP server products with a market share of more than 80% of the server market will support HTTP/2.
Proxies
Squid works on HTTP/2 support.
HAproxy? I haven’t gotten a straight answer from that team, but Willy Tarreau has been actively participating in the HTTP/2 work all the time so I expect them to have work in progress.
While very critical to the protocol, PHK of the Varnish project has said that Varnish will support it if it gets traction.
My estimate: By the end of 2015, the leading proxy software projects will start to have or are already shipping HTTP/2 support.
Services
Google (including Youtube and other sites in the Google family) and Twitter have ran HTTP/2 enabled for months already.
Lots of existing services offer SPDY today and I would imagine most of them are considering and pondering on how to switch to HTTP/2 as Chrome has already announced them going to drop SPDY during 2016 and Firefox will also abandon SPDY at some point.
My estimate: By the end of 2015 lots of the top sites of the world will be serving HTTP/2 or will be working on doing it.
Content Delivery Networks
Akamai plans to ship HTTP/2 by the end of the year. Cloudflare have stated that they “will support HTTP/2 once NGINX with it becomes available“.
Amazon has not given any response publicly that I can find for when they will support HTTP/2 on their services.
Not a totally bright situation but I also believe (or hope) that as soon as one or two of the bigger CDN players start to offer HTTP/2 the others might feel a bigger pressure to follow suit.
Non-browser clients
curl and libcurl support HTTP/2 since months back, and the HTTP/2 implementations page lists available implementations for just about all major languages now. Like node-http2 for javascript, http2-perl, http2 for Go, Hyper for Python, OkHttp for Java, http-2 for Ruby and more. If you do HTTP today, you should be able to switch over to HTTP/2 relatively easy.
More?
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few obvious points but I might update this as we go as soon as my dear readers point out my faults and mistakes!
How long is HTTP/1.1 going to be around?
My estimate: HTTP 1.1 will be around for many years to come. There is going to be a double-digit percentage share of the existing sites on the Internet (and who knows how many that aren’t even accessible from the Internet) for the foreseeable future. For technical reasons, for philosophical reasons and for good old we’ll-never-touch-it-again reasons.
The survey
Finally, I asked friends on twitter, G+ and Facebook what they think the HTTP/2 share would be by the end of 2015 with the help of a little poll. This does of course not make it into any sound or statistically safe number but is still just a collection of what a set of random people guessed. A quick poll to get a rough feel. This is how the 64 responses I received were distributed:
Evidently, if you take a median out of these results you can see that the middle point is between 5-10 and 10-15. I’ll make it easy and say that the poll showed a group estimate on 10%. Ten percent of the total HTTP traffic to be HTTP/2 at the end of 2015.
I didn’t vote here but I would’ve checked the 15-20 choice, thus a fair bit over the median but only slightly into the top quarter..
In plain numbers this was the distribution of the guesses:
| 0-5% | 29.1% (19) |
| 5-10% | 21.8% (13) |
| 10-15% | 14.5% (10) |
| 15-20% | 10.9% (7) |
| 20-25% | 9.1% (6) |
| 25-30% | 3.6% (2) |
| 30-40% | 3.6% (3) |
| 40-50% | 3.6% (2) |
| more than 50% | 3.6% (2) |
Fixing the Func KB-460 ‘-key
I use a Func KB-460 keyboard with Nordic layout – that basically means it is a qwerty design with the Nordic keys for “åäö” on the right side as shown on the picture above. (yeah yeah Swedish has those letters fairly prominent in the language, don’t mock me now)
The most annoying part with this keyboard has been that the key repeat on the apostrophe key has been sort of broken. If you pressed it and then another key, it would immediately generate another (or more than one) apostrophe. I’ve sort of learned to work around it with some muscle memory and treating the key with care but it hasn’t been ideal.
This problem is apparently only happening on Linux someone told me (I’ve never used it on anything else) and what do you know? Here’s how to fix it on a recent Debian machine that happens to run and use systemd so your mileage will vary if you have something else:
1. Edit the file “/lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb”. It contains keyboard mappings of scan codes to key codes for various keyboards. We will add a special line for a single scan code and for this particular keyboard model only. The line includes the USB vendor and product IDs in uppercase and you can verify that it is correct with lsusb -v and check your own keyboard.
So, add something like this at the end of the file:
# func KB-460
keyboard:usb:v195Dp2030*
KEYBOARD_KEY_70031=reserved
2. Now update the database:
$ udevadm hwdb –update
3. … and finally reload the tweaks:
$ udevadm trigger
4. Now you should have a better working key and life has improved!
With a slightly older Debian without systemd, the instructions I got that I have not tested myself but I include here for the world:
1. Find the relevant input for the device by “cat /proc/bus/input/devices”
2. Make a very simple keymap. Make a file with only a single line like this:
$ cat /lib/udev/keymaps/func
0x70031 reserved
3 Map the key with ‘keymap’:
$ sudo /lib/udev/keymap -i /dev/input/eventX /lib/udev/keymaps/func
where X is the event number you figured out in step 1.
The related kernel issue.
Summing up the birthday festivities
I blogged about curl’s 17th birthday on March 20th 2015. I’ve done similar posts in the past and they normally pass by mostly undetected and hardly discussed. This time, something else happened.
Primarily, the blog post quickly became the single most viewed blog entry I’ve ever written – and I’ve been doing it for many many years. Already in the first day it was up, I counted more than 65,000 views.
The blog post got more comments than on any other blog post I’ve ever done. Right now they have probably stopped but there are 60 of them now, almost everyone one of them saying congratulations and/or thanks.
The posting also got discussed on both hacker news and reddit, totaling in more than 260 comments. Most of those in positive spirit.
The initial tweet I made about my blog post is the most retweeted and stared tweet I’ve ever posted. At least 87 retweets and 49 favorites (it might even grow a bit more over time). Others subsequently also tweeted the link hundreds of times. I got numerous replies and friendly call-outs on twitter saying “congrats” and “thanks” in many variations.
Spontaneously (ie not initiated or requested by me but most probably because of a comment on hacker news), I also suddenly started to get donations from the curl web site’s donation web page (to paypal). Within 24 hours from my post, I had received 35 donations from friendly fans who donated a total sum of 445 USD. A quick count revealed that the total number of donations ever through the history of curl’s lifetime was 43 before this day. In one day we had basically gotten as many as we had gotten the first 17 years.
Interesting data from this donation “race”: I got donations varying from 1 USD (yes one dollar) to 50 USD and the average donation was then 12.7 USD.
Let me end this summary by thanking everyone who in various ways made the curl birthday extra fun by being nice and friendly and some even donating some of their hard earned money. I am honestly touched by the attention and all the warmth and positiveness. Thank you for proving internet comments can be this good!
curl, 17 years old today
Today we celebrate the fact that it is exactly 17 years since the first public release of curl. I have always been the lead developer and maintainer of the project.
When I released that first version in the spring of 1998, we had only a handful of users and a handful of contributors. curl was just a little tool and we were still a few years out before libcurl would become a thing of its own.
The tool we had been working on for a while was still called urlget in the beginning of 1998 but as we just recently added FTP upload capabilities that name turned wrong and I decided cURL would be more suitable. I picked ‘cURL’ because the word contains URL and already then the tool worked primarily with URLs, and I thought that it was fun to partly make it a real English word “curl” but also that you could pronounce it “see URL” as the tool would display the contents of a URL.
Much later, someone (I forget who) came up with the “backronym” Curl URL Request Library which of course is totally awesome.
17 years are 6209 days. During this time we’ve done more than 150 public releases containing more than 2600 bug fixes!
We started out GPL licensed, switched to MPL and then landed in MIT. We started out using RCS for version control, switched to CVS and then git. But it has stayed written in good old C the entire time.
The term “Open Source” was coined 1998 when the Open Source Initiative was started just the month before curl was born, which was superseded with just a few days by the announcement from Netscape that they would free their browser code and make an open browser.
We’ve hosted parts of our project on servers run by the various companies I’ve worked for and we’ve been on and off various free services. Things come and go. Virtually nothing stays the same so we better just move with the rest of the world. These days we’re on github a lot. Who knows how long that will last…
We have grown to support a ridiculous amount of protocols and curl can be built to run on virtually every modern operating system and CPU architecture.
The list of helpful souls who have contributed to make curl into what it is now have grown at a steady pace all through the years and it now holds more than 1200 names.
Employments
In 1998, I was employed by a company named Frontec Tekniksystem. I would later leave that company and today there’s nothing left in Sweden using that name as it was sold and most employees later fled away to other places. After Frontec I joined Contactor for many years until I started working for my own company, Haxx (which we started on the side many years before that), during 2009. Today, I am employed by my forth company during curl’s life time: Mozilla. All through this project’s lifetime, I’ve kept my work situation separate and I believe I haven’t allowed it to disturb our project too much. Mozilla is however the first one that actually allows me to spend a part of my time on curl and still get paid for it!
The Netscape announcement which was made 2 months before curl was born later became Mozilla and the Firefox browser. Where I work now…
Future
I’m not one of those who spend time glazing toward the horizon dreaming of future grandness and making up plans on how to go there. I work on stuff right now to work tomorrow. I have no idea what we’ll do and work on a year from now. I know a bunch of things I want to work on next, but I’m not sure I’ll ever get to them or whether they will actually ship or if they perhaps will be replaced by other things in that list before I get to them.
The world, the Internet and transfers are all constantly changing and we’re adapting. No long-term dreams other than sticking to the very simple and single plan: we do file-oriented internet transfers using application layer protocols.
Rough estimates say we may have a billion users already. Chances are, if things don’t change too drastically without us being able to keep up, that we will have even more in the future.
It has to feel good, right?
I will of course point out that I did not take curl to this point on my own, but that aside the ego-boost this level of success brings is beyond imagination. Thinking about that my code has ended up in so many places, and is driving so many little pieces of modern network technology is truly mind-boggling. When I specifically sit down or get a reason to think about it at least.
Most of the days however, I tear my hair when fixing bugs, or I try to rephrase my emails to no sound old and bitter (even though I can very well be that) when I once again try to explain things to users who can be extremely unfriendly and whining. I spend late evenings on curl when my wife and kids are asleep. I escape my family and rob them of my company to improve curl even on weekends and vacations. Alone in the dark (mostly) with my text editor and debugger.
There’s no glory and there’s no eternal bright light shining down on me. I have not climbed up onto a level where I have a special status. I’m still the same old me, hacking away on code for the project I like and that I want to be as good as possible. Obviously I love working on curl so much I’ve been doing it for over seventeen years already and I don’t plan on stopping.
Celebrations!
Yeps. I’ll get myself an extra drink tonight and I hope you’ll join me. But only one, we’ll get back to work again afterward. There are bugs to fix, tests to write and features to add. Join in the fun! My backlog is only growing…
Video: My curl talk from FOSDEM 2015
I mentioned the talk before, and now the video has been made available. About 25 minutes with me presenting curl.
TLS in HTTP/2
I’ve written the http2 explained document and I’ve done several talks about HTTP/2. I’ve gotten a lot of questions about TLS in association with HTTP/2 due to this, and I want to address some of them here.
TLS is not mandatory
In the HTTP/2 specification that has been approved and that is about to become an official RFC any day now, there is no language that mandates the use of TLS for securing the protocol. On the contrary, the spec clearly explains how to use it both in clear text (over plain TCP) as well as over TLS. TLS is not mandatory for HTTP/2.
TLS mandatory in effect
While the spec doesn’t force anyone to implement HTTP/2 over TLS but allows you to do it over clear text TCP, representatives from both the Firefox and the Chrome development teams have expressed their intents to only implement HTTP/2 over TLS. This means HTTPS:// URLs are the only ones that will enable HTTP/2 for these browsers. Internet Explorer people have expressed that they intend to also support the new protocol without TLS, but when they shipped their first test version as part of the Windows 10 tech preview, that browser also only supported HTTP/2 over TLS. As of this writing, there has been no browser released to the public that speaks clear text HTTP/2. Most existing servers only speak HTTP/2 over TLS.
The difference between what the spec allows and what browsers will provide is the key here, and browsers and all other user-agents are all allowed and expected to each select their own chosen path forward.
If you’re implementing and deploying a server for HTTP/2, you pretty much have to do it for HTTPS to get users. And your clear text implementation will not be as tested…
A valid remark would be that browsers are not the only HTTP/2 user-agents and there are several such non-browser implementations that implement the non-TLS version of the protocol, but I still believe that the browsers’ impact on this will be notable.
Stricter TLS
When opting to speak HTTP/2 over TLS, the spec mandates stricter TLS requirements than what most clients ever have enforced for normal HTTP 1.1 over TLS.
It says TLS 1.2 or later is a MUST. It forbids compression and renegotiation. It specifies fairly detailed “worst acceptable” key sizes and cipher suites. HTTP/2 will simply use safer TLS.
Another detail here is that HTTP/2 over TLS requires the use of ALPN which is a relatively new TLS extension, RFC 7301, which helps us negotiate the new HTTP version without losing valuable time or network packet round-trips.
TLS-only encourages more HTTPS
Since browsers only speak HTTP/2 over TLS (so far at least), sites that want HTTP/2 enabled must do it over HTTPS to get users. It provides a gentle pressure on sites to offer proper HTTPS. It pushes more people over to end-to-end TLS encrypted connections.
This (more HTTPS) is generally considered a good thing by me and us who are concerned about users and users’ right to privacy and right to avoid mass surveillance.
Why not mandatory TLS?
The fact that it didn’t get in the spec as mandatory was because quite simply there was never a consensus that it was a good idea for the protocol. A large enough part of the working group’s participants spoke up against the notion of mandatory TLS for HTTP/2. TLS was not mandatory before so the starting point was without mandatory TLS and we didn’t manage to get to another stand-point.
When I mention this in discussions with people the immediate follow-up question is…
No really, why not mandatory TLS?
The motivations why anyone would be against TLS for HTTP/2 are plentiful. Let me address the ones I hear most commonly, in an order that I think shows the importance of the arguments from those who argued them.
1. A desire to inspect HTTP traffic
There is a claimed “need” to inspect or intercept HTTP traffic for various reasons. Prisons, schools, anti-virus, IPR-protection, local law requirements, whatever are mentioned. The absolute requirement to cache things in a proxy is also often bundled with this, saying that you can never build a decent network on an airplane or with a satellite link etc without caching that has to be done with intercepts.
Of course, MITMing proxies that terminate SSL traffic are not even rare these days and HTTP/2 can’t do much about limiting the use of such mechanisms.
2. Think of the little ones
“Small devices cannot handle the extra TLS burden“. Either because of the extra CPU load that comes with TLS or because of the cert management in a billion printers/fridges/routers etc. Certificates also expire regularly and need to be updated in the field.
Of course there will be a least acceptable system performance required to do TLS decently and there will always be systems that fall below that threshold.
3. Certificates are too expensive
The price of certificates for servers are historically often brought up as an argument against TLS even it isn’t really HTTP/2 related and I don’t think it was ever an argument that was particularly strong against TLS within HTTP/2. Several CAs now offer zero-cost or very close to zero-cost certificates these days and with the upcoming efforts like letsencrypt.com, chances are it’ll become even better in the not so distant future.
Recently someone even claimed that HTTPS limits the freedom of users since you need to give personal information away (he said) in order to get a certificate for your server. This was not a price he was willing to pay apparently. This is however simply not true for the simplest kinds of certificates. For Domain Validated (DV) certificates you usually only have to prove that you “control” the domain in question in some way. Usually by being able to receive email to a specific receiver within the domain.
4. The CA system is broken
TLS of today requires a PKI system where there are trusted certificate authorities that sign certificates and this leads to a situation where all modern browsers trust several hundred CAs to do this right. I don’t think a lot of people are happy with this and believe this is the ultimate security solution. There’s a portion of the Internet that advocates for DANE (DNSSEC) to address parts of the problem, while others work on gradual band-aids like Certificate Transparency and OCSP stapling to make it suck less.
My personal belief is that rejecting TLS on the grounds that it isn’t good enough or not perfect is a weak argument. TLS and HTTPS are the best way we currently have to secure web sites. I wouldn’t mind seeing it improved in all sorts of ways but I don’t believe running protocols clear text until we have designed and deployed the next generation secure protocol is a good idea – and I think it will take a long time (if ever) until we see a TLS replacement.
Who were against mandatory TLS?
Yeah, lots of people ask me this, but I will refrain from naming specific people or companies here since I have no plans on getting into debates with them about details and subtleties in the way I portrait their arguments. You can find them yourself if you just want to and you can most certainly make educated guesses without even doing so.
What about opportunistic security?
A text about TLS in HTTP/2 can’t be complete without mentioning this part. A lot of work in the IETF these days are going on around introducing and making sure opportunistic security is used for protocols. It was also included in the HTTP/2 draft for a while but was moved out from the core spec in the name of simplification and because it could be done anyway without being part of the spec. Also, far from everyone believes opportunistic security is a good idea. The opponents tend to say that it will hinder the adoption of “real” HTTPS for sites. I don’t believe that, but I respect that opinion because it is a guess as to how users will act just as well as my guess is they won’t act like that!
Opportunistic security for HTTP is now being pursued outside of the HTTP/2 spec and allows clients to upgrade plain TCP connections to instead do “unauthenticated TLS” connections. And yes, it should always be emphasized: with opportunistic security, there should never be a “padlock” symbol or anything that would suggest that the connection is “secure”.
Firefox supports opportunistic security for HTTP and it will be enabled by default from Firefox 37.
Translations
ПоÑÑ‚ доÑтупен на Ñайте softdroid.net: ВоÑÑтановление: TLS в HTTP/2. (Russian)
TLS in HTTP/2 (Kazakh)
curl: embracing github more
Pull requests and issues filed on github are most welcome!
The curl project has been around for a long time by now and we’ve been through several different version control systems. The most recent switch was when we switched to git from CVS back in 2010. We were late switchers but then we’re conservative in several regards.
When we switched to git we also switched to github for the hosting, after having been self-hosted for many years before that. By using github we got a lot of services, goodies and reliable hosting at no cost. We’ve been enjoying that ever since.
However, as we have been a traditional mailing list driving project for a long time, I have previously not properly embraced and appreciated pull requests and issues filed at github since they don’t really follow the old model very good.
Just very recently I decided to stop fighting those methods and instead go with them. A quick poll among my fellow team mates showed no strong opposition and we are now instead going full force ahead in a more github embracing style. I hope that this will lower the barrier and remove friction for newcomers and allow more people to contribute easier.
As an effect of this, I would also like to encourage each and everyone who is interested in this project as a user of libcurl or as a contributor to and hacker of libcurl, to skip over to the curl github home and press the ‘watch’ button to get notified when future requests and issues appear.
We also offer this helpful guide on how to contribute to the curl project!
More HTTP framing attempts
Previously, in my exciting series “improving the HTTP framing checks in Firefox” we learned that I landed a patch, got it backed out, struggled to improve the checks and finally landed the fixed version only to eventually get that one backed out as well.
And now I’ve landed my third version. The amendment I did this time:
When receiving HTTP content that is content-encoded and compressed I learned that when receiving deflate compression there is basically no good way for us to know if the content gets prematurely cut off. They seem to lack the footer too often for it to make any sense in checking for that. gzip streams however end with a footer so they are easier to reliably detect when they are incomplete. (As was discovered before, the Content-Length: is far too often not updated by the server so it is instead wrongly showing the uncompressed size.)
This (deflate vs gzip) knowledge is now used by the patch, meaning that deflate compressed downloads can be cut off without the browser noticing…
Will this version of the fix actually stick? I don’t know. There’s lots of bad voodoo out there in the HTTP world and I’m putting my finger right in the middle of some of it with this change. I’m pretty sure I’ve not written my last blog post on this topic just yet… If it sticks this time, it should show up in Firefox 39.
curl, smiley-URLs and libc
Some interesting Unicode URLs have recently been seen used in the wild – like in this billboard ad campaign from Coca Cola, and a friend of mine asked me about curl in reference to these and how it deals with such URLs.
(Picture by stevencoleuk)
I ran some tests and decided to blog my observations since they are a bit curious. The exact URL I tried was ‘www.O.ws’ (not the same smiley as shown on this billboard – note that I’ve replace the actual smiley with “O” in this entire post since wordpress craps on it) – it is really hard to enter by hand so now is the time to appreciate your ability to cut and paste! It appears they registered several domains for a set of different smileys.
These smileys are not really allowed IDN (where IDN means International Domain Names) symbols which make these domains a bit different. They should not (see below for details) be converted to punycode before getting resolved but instead I assume that the pure UTF-8 sequence should or at least will be fed into the name resolver function. Well, either way it should either pass in punycode or the UTF-8 string.
If curl was built to use libidn, it still won’t convert this to punycode and the verbose output says “Failed to convert www.O.ws to ACE; String preparation failed”
curl (exact version doesn’t matter) using the stock threaded resolver
- Debian Linux (glibc 2.19) – FAIL
- Windows 7 – FAIL
- Mac OS X 10.9 – SUCCESS
But then also perhaps to no surprise, the exact same results are shown if I try to ping those host names on these systems. It works on the mac, it fails on Linux and Windows. Wget 1.16 also fails on my Debian systems (just as a reference and I didn’t try it on any of the other platforms).
My curl build on Linux that uses c-ares for name resolving instead of glibc succeeds perfectly. host, nslookup and dig all work fine with it on Linux too (as well as nslookup on Windows):
$ host www.O.ws www.O.ws has address 64.70.19.202$ ping www.O.ws ping: unknown host www.O.ws
While the same command sequence on the mac shows:
$ host www.O.ws www.O.ws has address 64.70.19.202$ ping www.O.ws PING www.O.ws (64.70.19.202): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from 64.70.19.202: icmp_seq=0 ttl=44 time=191.689 ms 64 bytes from 64.70.19.202: icmp_seq=1 ttl=44 time=191.124 ms
Slightly interesting additional tidbit: if I rebuild curl to use gethostbyname_r() instead of getaddrinfo() it works just like on the mac, so clearly this is glibc having an opinion on how this should work when given this UTF-8 hostname.
Pasting in the URL into Firefox and Chrome works just fine. They both convert the name to punycode and use “www.xn--h28h.ws” which then resolves to the same IPv4 address.
Update: as was pointed out in a comment below, the “64.70.19.202” IP address is not the correct IP for the site. It is just the registrar’s landing page so it sends back that response to any host or domain name in the .ws domain that doesn’t exist!
What do the IDN specs say?
This is not my area of expertise. I had to consult Patrik Fältström here to get this straightened out (but please if I got something wrong here the mistake is still all mine). Apparently this smiley is allowed in RFC 3940 (IDNA2003), but that has been replaced by RFC 5890-5892 (IDNA2008) where this is DISALLOWED. If you read the spec, this is 263A.
So, depending on which spec you follow it was a valid IDN character or it isn’t anymore.
What does the libc docs say?
The POSIX docs for getaddrinfo doesn’t contain enough info to tell who’s right but it doesn’t forbid UTF-8 encoded strings. The regular glibc docs for getaddrinfo also doesn’t say anything and interestingly, the Apple Mac OS X version of the docs says just as little.
With this complete lack of guidance, it is hardly any additional surprise that the glibc gethostbyname docs also doesn’t mention what it does in this case but clearly it doesn’t do the same as getaddrinfo in the glibc case at least.
What’s on the actual site?
A redirect to www.emoticoke.com which shows a rather boring page.
Who’s right?
I don’t know. What do you think?