Marten Lehmann added the comment:

I found an interesting link about this issue:

http://www.unicode.org/faq/idn.html

I also checked a domain name of a client that ends with 'straße.de': IE, 
Firefox and Chrome still use IDNA2003, Opera already does IDNA2008.

In IDNA2008 a lot of characters aren't allowed any longer (like symbols or 
strike-through letters). But I think this doesn't have any practical relevance, 
because even while IDNA2003 formally allowed these characters, domain name 
registries disallowed to register internationalized domain names containing any 
of these characters.

Most registries restricted the allowed characters very strong, e.g. in the .de 
zone you cannot use Japanese characters, only those in use within the German 
language. Some other registries expect you to submit a language property during 
the domain registration and then only special characters within that language 
are allowed in the domain name. Also, most registries don't allow to register a 
domain name that mixes different languages.

So IDNA2008 is the future and hopefully shouldn't break a lot. I don't know of 
any real life use of the IDNA encoding other than DNS / URLs. I don't know how 
many existing modules in PyPI working with URLs already make use of the current 
encodings.idna class but I guess it would cause more work if they all would 
have to change their code to use name.encode('idna2008') or work with an 
outdated encoding in the end if unchanged than just silentely switching to 
IDNA2008 for encodings.idna and add encodings.idna2003 for those who really 
need the old one for some reason. Reminds me a bit on the range() / xrange() 
thing. Now the special new xrange() is the default and called just range() 
again. I guess in some years we'll look back on the IDNA2003/2008 transition 
the same way.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue17305>
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