Internationalized Domain Names Coming Soon 526
rduke15 writes "You think you know how to parse a domain name for validity? Well, in case you haven't noticed, things are getting tougher as registrars keep adopting IDN (Internationalized Domain Names), which uses a weird encoding named Punycode to enable accented characters in domain names. The Register reports about Switzerland, Germany and Austria's joint move to enable IDN. See the overview in English from Switch. But I guess it would be difficult to talk about this on /., since it does not even support basic Latin-1 ... :-)"
Isn't there a better way? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not extend dns to support unicode? That way they'd be no translation or other crap to go through.
Granted software would need changing but that be the case with the mangled crap that's mentioned in the article.
What am I not understanding here? Or is this just implementation dreamed up to make life complicated?
really dumb sounding (Score:5, Interesting)
Useful? Naw. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure what all the accents are on the alphabet, will I have to know to type them to access a simple website? Sorry, this doesn't make using the net easier.
Maybe not as useful as one might believe (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunate but true, if a company has a Chinese domain name, it would probably be only used within China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan (since it's unicode), and maybe South Korea. The company would be pretty much limited to the East Asia market.
However, I suppose the company could get both a Chinese domain and an English, or rather Pinyin, domain so they could make their Chinese, or maybe other Asian clients feel "closer" while also being able to reach clients outside of East Asia.
I also think that it'd be great to give people the option of having a native-language email address. It's not too hard to set up a romanized email alias for it. An SMTP "X-Roman-Address" header could even by added to outgoing messages in case a recipient can't read the default "From" line.
Re:Useful? Naw. (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm sure it will make it easier if that is your native language!
That said, this looks like a stupid kludgy implementation of accented characters. Use unicode!!
Re:Isn't there a better way? (Score:2, Interesting)
djbdns doesn't support unicode either, although it doesn't rely on standard c-libraries, so unicode support might only take a few weeks to add.
Unicode would be better than punycode, but punycode works with existing DNS client and server software.
Re:Useful? Naw. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Maybe not as useful as one might believe (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, they would "limit" themselves to the fastest growing economy in the world and a market of about 2 billion people...who'd want that?
P.S. Why can't that company have a chineese domain name and a roman-character domain name? Is there a law I don't know about?
Well... it's still not perfect (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, what about the
This is the reasoning I've heard, as to why IBM is ai-bi-emu in Japan. And maikurosofuto, souni, etc. (roomaji transliteration there, sorry if you don't get why ai=I)
So what do you do in this case? Unless they can enter Shift-JIS or Unicode URLs, then you're stuck having people enter roomaji versions of your name, which remember, aren't technically trademarkable.
I'd love to hear I'm wrong on some point here, could anyone with more info clue me in?
Re:Bad idea but bound to happen with todays thinki (Score:2, Interesting)
Good day to answer to a troll, here goes...
26 letters and 0-9 are not the best way to communicate with computer if your native language has more than 26 letters in its alphabet. It's not about being insulted or offended, it's about being understood. The computer speaks all natural languages equally badly, after all.
Let's think about average nordic webshop owner who sells beds online for a minute, operating for example in Finland or Sweden. He wants to sell stuff to the native dwellers and hence needs a domain name that has an "a" with two dots on top of it so that the domain name for bed is spelled corretly in swedish or finnish. It might surprise some people, but there are quite a lot of people who don't speak a single word of english. So the people who he wishes to sell beds to A) know how to spell "bed" in their native language and B)have a key like that in their keyboards, and, *gasp* prefer to use correct spelling when referring to things!
So you don't have an "a" with two dots on your keyboard? That's just too bad, but then again you probably don't speak finnish too well either. Why would you want to visit that e-bedshop then?
Re:Isn't there a better way? (Score:4, Interesting)
The registries using UTF-8 (most notably
The Swedish registry is only using IDN. The reason for that is that UTF-8 in DNS is not an internet supported standard at all.
http://www.xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se/ [xn--rksmrgs-5wao1o.se] will work if you are using a recend Mozilla. (Slashdot should upgrade to at least ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8... I couldn't write raksmorgas.se correctly.)
Microsoft are extremly slow in supporting IDN, and will probably not launch it until next OS release which is in 2006... There are plugins from Verisign.
Do a good thing, release an open source plugin for MSIE.
Re:URLs that you cannot type (Score:3, Interesting)
Or how about URLs you have to spell differently than you spell the name of the company in question? Thats a pretty harebraided idea, but one very many* people online today. Take for instance norwegians (as I happen to be one myself). The norwegian alphabet consists of 29 letters, the old 26 from latin (a-z) as well as three I can't show you here on /. since the site for some bizarre reason don't support them**. Therefore we're forced to use 'ae', 'oe' and 'aa'*** instead, opening for plenty more misunderstandsings for _norwegian_ websites catering for the _norwegian_ public. And since I still have to discover any online tranlator that can translate norwegian into english, I dare say that the chance of any non-norwegian needing to type the URL is slim at best.
So frankly, you can have a big serving of STFU. If you don't see the point of this, you prolly will never use it anyway, or even notice. For those of us who actually care, this is pretty good news.
__*) I would - wihtout seeing any proof - guess that the majority of people online today does not speak english as their native tounge.
_**) Other US sites do...
***) For those interested, the ascii-codes are 230, 248 and 229 for small letters, and 198, 216 and 197 for capitals.
Re:FINALLY! (Score:3, Interesting)
For the Maya's, zero was not just a placeholder. It signified the concept of an absence of value, a.k.a. an empty set.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero [wikipedia.org]
History
The numeral or digit zero is used in numeral systems, where the position of a digit signifies its value, with successive positions having higher values, and the digit zero is used to skip a position. By about 300 BCE the Babylonians used two slanted wedges to mark an empty place in a given sequence of positional digits. It did not function in the true sense of a number. The use of zero as a number unto itself was introduced into mathematics relatively late by Indian mathematicians. An early study of the zero by Brahmagupta dates to 628.
Zero was also used as a numeral in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. It was used by the Olmec and subsequent civiliations; see also: Maya numerals.
The ancient Maya civilization used a vigesimal (base-20) numeral system. [wikipedia.org]
A vigesimal numeral system has a base of twenty. [wikipedia.org]
Compatibility question (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm asking because today, I've tried out the Netsol [verisign.com] way of doing umlauts and they don't work at all with my Mac OS X and Safari: None of the listed domains work. The page lists a "plugin" that every web user is supposed to install, but it's Win only (of course...) and it's quite silly to have a domain with umlauts if you have to tell all your customers "before visiting me, please install this plugin"...
Any idea if this new way work in all circumstances where the user has a international keyboard? Thanks!
This is important.. (Score:5, Interesting)
In most of the languages with 'funny accents' like umlauts, these characters often have a completely different pronounciation, and are often considered to be a completely different letter than without the 'accent'.
Simply 'brushing off the dirt' and removing the 'accent' thus changes the word. Sometimes with wierd results.
Just ask someone from the town of Moensteraas, Sweden [monsteras.se].
Their website contains mostly municipal information intended for swedes, but due to the restrictions of DNS, the name is instead spelt 'monsteras', which means 'monster-carcass' in Swedish.
Obviously, these people would be happier spelling it with umlauts on the o, and a ring over the a.
Multiple Non-Technical Problems (Score:2, Interesting)
Say for instance, you get a spam that has a url to http://www.microsoft.com/freeoffers
You too were tricked, but you'll notice that instead of a normal i, it is instead replaced with an accented i or an i with a grave (slashdot strips these btw). Anyone that doesn't use accents (english, japanese, chinese, etc) probably won't catch the minor detail and will probably think that it's really pointing to www.microsoft.com.
This is very similar to, but less obvious than using:
http://www.microsoft.com@via.gra.biz/offers
Most non-tech internet users will also believe this to be Microsoft's web-site. Spammers will have a hay day with all of the new opportunities.
The second non-technical problem is that say I want to go to a Japanese web-site that doesn't have an english url. If I don't know kana/kanji (like most countries don't), then I don't know what letters to type in to get the correct japanese. I would have to get a dictionary and look up each character to figure out what to type.
I agree that it's lame to only have it in english, but at this point, any country that uses the internet already has the ability to type english, but now they will need to be able to type in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Greek, etc, etc, etc....
Re:Useful? Naw. (Score:3, Interesting)