IRIs and the use of english
After noticing that the IDN URI in Matthew Garrett's post does not work when clicked in liferea, we investigated the problem on IRC. What happens is that the page contains a raw UTF-8 URI (which is not valid in the context of HTML 4), gnome-open %-escapes the UTF-8 characters it gets on the command line (which may be a good idea, but is not even remotely backward compatible) and galeon tries to use the %-encoded hostname without decoding it back (which is reasonable, as the IRI standard has not yet been finalized).
Using raw UTF-8 in web pages is bad because it's not conformant and breaks non-IDN-enabled applications, but it's a fact of life that people will do this and the software should cope. So IDN support should be added to gnome-open. It's easy, if you want to see an example look at how I did it for whois.
If after reading this you still want to know more about IRIs, you can start with this presentation.
Joe Wreschnig took a cheap shot at me after misundertanding my debian-legal post. I think this is embarassing, but anyway here it is: Joe, I hoped it would be obvious that my sentence was referred to the idea of evaluating licenses with other criteria not part the DFSG. I know what the "G" in "DFSG" means, and I can't see the point of arguing over this. I suppose that this has to be expected when dealing with language lawyers...