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In the UTF-8 encoding (defined by RFC2279), it takes between one and six octets (bytes) to encode one character, although no currently assigned character needs more than three. UTF-8 can address all the 2147483648 characters of ISO-10646-1.

In the UTF-16 encoding (RFC2781), it takes either two or four octets (bytes) to encoed one character, although no currently assigned character needs four. UTF-16 can access only the first 1114112 characters of ISO-10646-1 (the first 17 planes), which form the Unicode range proper.

Both these encodings use characters outside the ASCII range (i.e. 8-bit characters), which are not supported by current BIND versions, but which are still permitted by the DNS standards (RFC1034&1035).

However, the proposed IDNS standard does not use either of these encodings (IMHO not using UTF-8 is a terrible mistake) but yet another one, called UTF-5 (see "draft-jseng-utf5-00" in Internet Drafts).

In the UTF-5 encoding (defined by the aforementioned dreft), it takes between one and eight octets (bytes) to encode one character, although no currently assigned character needs more than four. UTF-5 can address all the 2147483648 characters of ISO-10646-1.

If UTF-5 is used on DNS labels, you can have up to 15 Chinese characters in such a label.

Recently I posted this comment mentioning the fact that there's really no reason why a domain such as www..com (you should see two Chinese ideograms meaning "China" between the "www." and the ".com" parts; further, if you click on this link, your browser should open a window telling you that the domain "www..com" does not exist, with the same two Chinese ideograms) doesn't exist.

Let us recall: first, as specified by the HTML specification, every HTML document, no matter what character set it is "encoded" as, is written in the all-englobing Unicode character set. So when you write something like "中国" in HTML, it refers to the Unicode characters (decimal) 20013 and 22269, no matter what the current character encoding and font are. So that's how you write the link text. Second, as for the URL itself, well, although it is not (as far as I know) formally recommended by an Internet standard, it is widely recognized that URLs are written in the UTF-8 encoding format (which is afterward %-encoded into ASCII).

The whole process is described in this Internet Draft ("Internationalized Uniform Resource Identifiers"; WORK IN PROGRESS!) by Larry Masinter and Martin Duerst where the relationship between URIs and IURIs (Internationalized URIs) is discussed in detail.

The DNS is the toughest part of all. The DNS specification (RFC1034) states (section 3.1) that DNS data is to be taken as binary for possible upward compatibility (this was wonderful foresight on Mockapetris' part!). Consequently, there is nothing as per standards wrong with using (UTF-8 encoded Unicode) 8-bit data in DNS labels. Except, of course, that many "buggy" implementations will have to be corrected for broken assumptions, *sigh*. The IDNS working group suggests using a UTF-5 encoding to avoid going beyond the current domain name limits: I think this is not a good thing and we should stick to UTF-8 and repair broken software.

Oh, and incidentally, see this page too know how broken your browser's Unicode support is.

There was an article about the I-DNS method in several publications last week. Apparently the power-that-be (internic etc.) are considering adopting this standard. The idea is to use the usual 7 or 8 bit domain format, but lay unicode on top of it using a UTF-5 encoding. This encoding represents unicode characters using ascii [0-9A-Z], so zhongguo.com will map to an 8 bit string like G61H890.com in the DNS database.

This looks like a good idea, but it requires some work on the client end to generate UTF-5 lookup requests, and display urls correctly. I'm not sure what an anchor tag will look like in this system, i.e. whether the domain should be in the page's native encoding, or utf-5.

In any case. with a little bit of hex arithmetic (see the site for info) you can now domain squat in dozens of languages.

iDNS is a project to extend the current DNS so that we can use Unicode instead of 7-bits (F)ASCII code. It seems that the main servers are operated from East Asia.
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While some people are not going to like this, here's what i think to be a good solution for cybersquatting: a good heirarchy.
first, scrap .com, .net, and .org . there should be a .co.us and .net.us instead.
the whole idea of a global domain pool is stupid, esp. when it coexists with a wide selection of TLDs.
what would be so wrong with com.us or net.us for us-only companies, instead of .com?
now, if companies were allowed to register only in their respective heirarchy, wouldn't most problems be solved?
also, the attempt to divide domains into 4 or 5 major types is also rather silly. why not have lots of domain types?
there are so many reasons why one would want to register a domain, making the current division unsuitable.
this is also already being attempted: see the GTLD project and iDNS for such attempts.
the more domains available, the less options there are for squatting, and the more fair the sharing becomes.

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Set your browser to SJIS mode to see this.It's too bad DNS doesn't allow for unicode domain names... yet... check out http://www.idns.org/ for an implementation of a more internationalized DNS!

IDNS.org has a spec for non-ASCII domain names. They have a modified version of Bind available for download.

Getting this adopted universally is nontrivial.

Well, you could try the internationalization page at the W3C website.

There are some draft proposals for internationalizing URLs and domain names... including iDNS.

Unfortunately, none of these proposals seem to have gotten very far. Too bad...