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ICANN Plans Non-English Character Domain Testbed
Wanted writes: "This article reveals ICANN's plan to open registration of domain names
with national characters. Actually it's Network Solutions, who are responsible for technical issues of implementing that project. Initially they want to support CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), then Spanish and other European languages. I don't know why they like Spaniards, but I'd rather say about supporting ISO-8859-1, not particular languages. Nevertheless the Internationalized Domain Names IETF Working Group should be pretty happy about it. Wonder, how would you type www.wong-kar-wai.org in Chinese with classic keyboard :)"
Second, if you can't type the url because you don't understand it, how do you expect to understand the information on the page that it points to?
Well, for example, assume that there's a new brand called El Perro Rabioso selling, say, spiced cucumbers. They have a web page www.el-perro-rabioso.com, which they are advertising all over the place. I don't understand Spanish, and have simply memorized the link, so I'll just go there and see if they have an English section. All works fine since it's Spanish, I understand the alphabet.
Substitute Spanish for Korean and maybe you'll see the problem.
Besides, not all information needs be written. Some Chinese site by Mr. Wu might just contain nice images of sunsets in the Chinese countryside or something. But if I'm unable to type the URL of the web page, I cannot view the information, even though I would understand the images (but not necessarily the image captions).
Your argument about software is true and interesting. Maybe we'll soon have a Babelfish-kind function in our web browser, paint-n-translate! Now that would be cool.
I guess most of the posters here are americans, because you just can't grasp that there is a need for this in most other countries. If you can't type ö on your keyboard - too bad. You know what? There will be software that helps you with this, or web services. I promise: the majority of times you want to visit a webpage on a URL with a >7 bit character in it, you will have a link for it. Just point and click! What is so difficult with that? The big problem will occur when you try to read the page. It will consist of letters in combinations that you can not understand. They will not make up english words. You will have to take a course in another language to get it. That will be the hard part. But just relax, because the english/american web will still be the dominant one, and you will not feel you have missed anything.
www.ràÐÊMåRk-LâwSÜïTs-ÄRè-ÙS.com
[ maur_at_technologist.com ] "For a sufficiently powerful message,
[ http://maur.litestep.com ] the medium is irrelevant."
Spoken by a man whose country invented the fine art of Paki-bashing.
First, 8-bit computers are still in use now, and their bus width does not prevent them from dealing with data of any format.
Second, DNS already is in use, and NOONE BUT "UNICODERS" EVER COMPLAINED about ASCII use in it. There is no demand for this feature, only some people's desire to break all existing software to sell "updates".
Domain name is an address. Address should be reachable from everywhere and everything. This works even for postal addresses -- I can write them in English, and they will reach the intended destination in any country, be it US, Spain, Russia or Japan. The same functionality is available now with DNS, but if this proposal will be implemented, it won't be available from every computer unless everyone will switch to Unicode -- and that won't happen until Hell freezes over (being Russian I have all reasons to be sure about that).
If someone is too concerned about "good-looking" addresses, they should implement some name-translation service like AOL keywords for people who don't like DNS, but the basic architecture of the Internet should not lose interoperability just because someone wants to add one useless feature to his shitty software.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Not completely true. The domain name is an alias. The dotted quad is the address.
Tell me why I can't put a name server out there that supports more characters? Yes, comaptibility will be a problem but not an impossible one. The DNS request must inform the server which charset it is using. Default to UTF-8 of course.
So we have the following alternatives. (Let's accept "unicode" for "standardized extended charset" in the following OK?)
1) I run a web server with a UTF-8 domain name. No problem, a Unicode DNS will be able to handle the ascii subset.
2) I run a web server with a unicode domain name. I must register my domain with a unicode dns and I'd be wise to also register a UTF-8 domain name as an alias if I think my domain name will cause trouble.
This works even for postal addresses -- I can write them in English, and they will reach the intended destination in any country, be it US, Spain, Russia or Japan
Well, but can you write an adress in russian and expect the letter to be delivered in the US? Or in russia, if mailed in the US?
If someone is too concerned about "good-looking" addresses, they should implement some name-translation service like AOL keywords for people who don't like DNS, but the basic architecture of the Internet should not lose interoperability just because someone wants to add one useless feature to his shitty software.
Someone sure is "too concerned" and I rather have ICANN setting a standard than wait until there is an AOL/MS proprietary name space.
I do see your point. Clueless fibbling with DNS is not a good thing. *My* point it that that is exactly what will happen unless it is done the proper way.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
All you need is MacOS 9 or Windows 98SE. Both are capable of Chinese input. With Windows 98SE, I believe you have to download it from Microsoft, but it's no big deal. There are two basic input methods for Traditional Chinese characters. Pinyin and BoPoMoFo. Pinyin is spelling out the sounds with arabic characters, and BoPoMoFo maps the Mandarin alphabet (of which the four first 'letters' are the name) to the standard keyboard layout.
dont fscking assume
the purpose of a domain is global accessibility, not so users with keyboard type x and input method y can access it.
Why not for .com, .org and .edu? What makes you think non-US netizens are not entitled to use such TLD's?
.es, .se, .de etc. are hosted on the US, and viceversa.
the target audience for a given domain can always have the input method to support accessing hosts in that domain
What if the target audience is on vacation in some other foreign country? Will they have to go to a cyber-ethnic-café to browse their local paper?
The DNS system is the same for all domains, so if one certain TLD can use certain encoding, what's to stop the rest of TLD's to use it? Nameservers don't know the difference, they just hold the data. Many
The fact that you can't make sense of the names is irrelevant. As long as someone might get benefited (domain registrars, for example) it will eventually happen.
The problem is not that we have language-specific characters, is that you don't. We don't consider them special, except for the fact that we can't use them normally (without kludges like i18n features) on a computer.
i18n should be about content, not about presentation.
Well, we don't host all of our domains in Spanish ISP's, you know.
Ummm... I thought there were a lot of european-descent people among the US. Wouldn't for example the irish americans prefer to type fáilté.com?
So would you use something like vvvvvv.domain.se? :-) (assuming you use vv instead of w)
Numbers. 417 million people speak Spanish, 191 million speak Portuguese, 128 million each speak French and German, and no other Latin-alphabet European language has as many as 100 million speakers. It isn't that NSI prefers Spaniards, it's that it prefers larger markets over smaller ones.
CJK has a similar "numbers" vibe. Since the CJK character sets are generally handled by a single solution in software (esp. since written forms of Japanese and Korean include both native syllabic/alphabetic [respectively] scripts and Chinese idographic script), you get Japan, Korea, and Greater China in one fell swoop. (Greater China here not only including the PRC and Taiwan, but the Chinese-speaking groups in Maylasia, Singapore, and Indonesia.)
So why not Devanagari too? Because 1) there are a lot more CJK and Spanish language customers than Hindi/Bengali customers due to internet penetration and financial factors, and 2) the people who would buy the domains in India generally are of the educated classes that speak English. So there's less demand for Devanagari.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Yeah, like if you have a domain in say, swahili, that's the official site for The country's government, How does the Japanese community type the domain to go to the site?
I see the future with this domain system pretty stupid.
The American Embassy, for Instance, have 24 sets of Keyboards per computer- to access the sites of the other countries.
You are mistaken in that it does not always use TWO characters, but it is a variable number. You are also mistaken in the assumption of 65536 characters in Unicode, there actually are more than 65536 codes and the provision is for up to 20 bits. Finally you are mistaken in the assumption that 31 characters would be limiting for Chinese names. Those chinese characters are much more powerful than letters or digits, so far fewer of them are required to form a name.
http://domän.nu/
Interesting, BIND 8 works with it (my nameserver), but when I enter that in nslookup it pukes (i.e. I can use a webbrowser [IE 5.5], but can't type it into nslookup).
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If you sell a product internationally, and use a lots of strange letters in the url, you are just stupid. Of course you should use a "classic" url for this. But if you have a company that delivers shrimp sandwiches within a swedish town, you should be able to use the domain räksmörgåsar.se instead of raksmorgasar.se.
No, not everyone. I don't agree that a company has that right, and I bet I'm not alone. As far as I'm concerned, in the chaos of the net you get to sink or swim on your own merits and companies don't get any special perks. The real irony here is that some of these so-called pornographers actually supply more content than the domains they ape, but you suggest we should take measures to prevent that.
(UNFAIR Term applied to advantages enjoyed by other people which we tried to cheat them out of and didn't manage. See also DISHONESTY, SNEAKY, UNDERHAND, and JUST LUCKY I GUESS.
--The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
One word: Paypal (don't go there, it's fake!), the site that was set up to divert Paypal customers and get them to leak their credit card info to some HaX0R d00d. Note that the 'I' and the 'l' look very similar on the bottom line of Netscape...
It seems a cool idea. I think that many problems surrounding URL i18n can be solved.
Does this mean I can register micrösoft.com and yàhoo.com and släshdot.org?
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They don't have to by law, obviously. They would have to do it if they want to avoid people registering a similar name and putting up a porn site, or something.
(3 * 7) * (1 * 2) * (2 * 5) * (1 * 5) * (1 * 2) == 4200.
How do you decide which of those forty-two hundred possible accented domains Docrates gets first refusal rights on?
Conflicts with existing names are mostly dangerous when the user might type the name and make a typo. Evidently you would not type such a thing as "amazn.com" (here the "o" before the "n" is replaced by the cyrillic form of the same letter which is supposedly indistinguishable from it). When you are following links, well, you are following links, and you are therefore trusting the site with the links to some extent. After all, non-power users rarely read the URL written at the bottom of the page, in any case: if someone writes a site which looks very much like a well-known site and links to it, whatever the URL, many users will be fooled. I don't think "internationalized URLs" will be a major change in this respect.
Slashdot's handling of accented characters in nicknames was completely grotesque, in any case. It was done naïvely by taking the 8-bit data as submitted and using it in the URL. But this is not how it works: the data should have been encoded in UTF-8 beforehand.
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Here you should see an upper-case e with an acute acent: é. Here you should see an upper-case Y with two dots on it: . Here you should see a capital greek Gamma: . Here you should see a Hebrew aleph and a Hebrew beth: ; of course, the aleph should be on the right because it is first (unless there was a line split between the two). Here you should see the Devanagari "OM" sign: . Here you should see a smiling face: . Here you should see the Chinese (or Japanese) character for "sun": . None of this should depend on your selected "document encoding". If you did not see all that, then your browser is broken and you should change it.
I think this is a great idea. But I also think it has some problems, such as how does one write the address?
For example, I can't tell a Chinese symbol for dog from that of a cat, so how am I supposed to write the address from memory, supposing I want to visit the English section of Wang-Chan's Noodle Soup Test Drive or something?
And vice versa, how will some Chinese person write, for example, umlauted characters (å, ö, ä, ë and so on)
Finally you are mistaken in the assumption that 31 characters would be limiting for Chinese names. Those chinese characters are much more powerful than letters or digits, so far fewer of them are required to form a name
That's interesting -- that had entirely escaped me. (This from the kid who spent years studying Egyptian and Mayan ideograms. *smack*) And I thought 63 characters was incredibly long in English. You could have an several haikus in Japanese ideograms as a domain name!
I like ICANN but
NSI really pisses
me off a lot
-Waldo
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I could see this as a possible way of the internet "cleaving" into national groups. What I mean, is that there is no easy way for me to type in asian characters to get to a site, and if someone is used to an asian-only computer system, how do they go to Russian sites without clicking on a link or knowing an IP address?
At the risk of sounding anglo-centric, isn't this a big blow against interoperability?
Again, your assumption is that people who do not agree with you do not understand those issues and therefore must be American. Furthermore, the issue is not whether you should be able to have a domain name with a Jönsson component, but whether you should be able to stick that in .com, .org, or .net. I do not see the problem with it for ISO 8859-1 characters, but I do understand the argument against it. Furthermore, I don't think .com, .org, or .net should be extended beyond the extended latin characters for reasons I have already enumerated.
And I really do not like your dismissal of any American point of view on the matter.
{resume, résume, resumé, résumé}.{com, net, org, new TLDs}
Costly!
The only thing I'm worried about is that infrastructure/backbone-level software might break.
Because:
1) I can't read a Japanese-language site whether or not I can get to it.
2) If I could read it, I'd use software that let me input it.
3) A rational web designer will register a non-accented Roman/ASCII character name if they intend to reach an audience that may include people who can't input other characters. The irrational deserve to have their sites fail anyway.
Steven E. Ehrbar
Romaji is the roman alphabet transliteration of hiragana and katakana. You've confused it with a mixture of katakana, the phonetic alphabet used for imported words, or kanji, the pictographic alphabet.
Domain names should map from something like: "Señor Hussong's Cantina.com" to "senorhussongscantina.com". Spaces, punctuation, and hyphens should be deleted. Special characters should be translated into the closest low ascii character.
This way, you can write your domain name however you want, and there isn't so much of a potential for people registering something similar.
Hyphens have got to be the dumbest idea of all time. If you have a multi-word name, you almost have to register both with and without the hyphen or you will lose visitors.
Even better would be using something like soundex, which makes a "hash" of a name so that similar sounding words map to the same value. Memorizing exact spelling is not something people are used to doing.
They shouldn't do CKJ domain names, they should just define a standard translation, which can then be incorporated into client software and possibly into DNS systems. What's next, I'll be unable to get to a site unless I also choose the correct encoding? Let's see, was that "cool-shit.org in 8859-1, or coolshit.org in japanese encoding, or maybe cool-shit.net eastern european encoding. Or was it coolshít.org?"
"If
Yeah, cause we all know everyone in the whole fuckin' world can read English! (Well, those who can't aren't worth shit anyway.)
ISO-8859-1 is not an English-specific character set. There is nothing english-centric about it. And again, my comments are directed towards .com, .org, and .net which are American TLDs in spite of the trend of foreign companies using them.
I suggest you get a fucking clue.
> Unless I'm mistaken, Unicode is a combination of two ASCII characters to create a single one
You are mistaken.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
See my comment about just such a system.
Several points that ICANN should keep in mind:
1. America built the foundations of the internet as we know it. The core, as DARPANET, was our government's baby.
2. Most languages can translitterate to Latin characters. (It may be messy, but it works.)
3. Other nations that have sites on the Internet have decided to play by the rules we (Americans) laid out. Only one person per IP at a time, Latin-character domain names.
4. I don't care what you'll tell me; the Net is way too new to be fragmented by this sort of gross nationalization.
"And they said onto the Lord.. How the hell did you do THAT?!"
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Slashdot has had to ban accented characters to prevent this kind of abuse; ICANN should do the same lest they a similar outbreak of mimicry infect the entire Web.
History of the "Something must be done to control the outbreak" syndrome.
Early 1990s: OMG! People are making up their own web sites in large numbers. Thousands of people will see them and be unable to distinguish fact from fiction.
Mid 1990s: OMG! People are now making up their own news sites. Millions of people are reading them and can't tell the difference between real and fake news.
Late 1990s: OMG! People are posting stock market tips which are causing market fluctuations. People will be unable to tell the difference between real and fake stock market news!
Early 2000s: OMG! People are allowed to use accented chars. Millions of people will be diverted to fake sites which use similar accented chars in their domain name, and thus be unable to tell the difference between real and fake sites!
Here, take a chill pill. Welcome to the internet, my friend.
w/m
This is a bad idea -- domain names must be interoperable on all systems, with or without Unicode or any other charset support, with or without keyboard capable of entering certain characters. The ASCII subset allowed in DNS now is the only subset supported by absolutely all computers (even ones that natively use EBCDIC), and no matter how the use of other charsets (and/or Unicode) will expand, this is not going to change. I see it as an attempt to just promote "unicodefication" of existing standards for no good reason.
And if anyone cares, my native language has nothing to do with ASCII.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
The squishy-wishy writing style is reminisent of Omni magazine. Bleh!
And to answer the
Q: why are today's laptops so damn slow?
A: 5400rpm IDE drives.
http://koax.org
Considering monumental failures such as Esperanto and others, personally I can consider english the closest we have to an international language. I know that at least in europe and many asian countries, you can get around at least a little with english. No other language can claim that.
/etc/hosts so it won't break any of the existing tools.
The internet has silently standardized on english. I always thought standards were a good thing. The english alphabet is relatively easy to learn, and noone forces you to actually spell english words.
(As a disclaimer: I'm not a native english speaker, but I don't have a problem with english being the language of the 'net)
I think this would be a huge step backwards. people will start memorizing IP addresses again instead of names.
probably the first thing I'd do is write an application that for every funky-characterd domain name I see I'd automatically alias it to an english name in
BlahSo the problems are that DNS servers won't support it for a while (if ever) and the people with such domain names will get a rude awakening when they won't be able to use most of the existing tools with their funky new domain names.
Slashdot has had to ban accented characters to prevent this kind of abuse; ICANN should do the same lest they a similar outbreak of mimicry infect the entire Web.
People should realize that it's a world wide web. It's not only american, and it should not only be in english -- diversity is important. And if you want to support other languages, you have to accept accented characters; they are not only "decorative", they make a whole difference.
Sure people will abuse it. But we already have slahsdot.org and other similar sites. It's already being abused.
Você não acha?
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This space left intentionally blank.
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.
It's a minor miracle that I can read this and reply to it at all. I'm at the airport waiting for a flight and using my PalmIIIc with Avantgo, hooked up to a Motorola Timeport PCS phone. Most of the Unicode characters in your post did not show up. There are few alternatives to Avantgo for the Palm. Eudora Web doesn't do any better...
Edith Keeler Must Die
To input CJK chars, you don't just poke in alt codes until you get it. Asians would go insane if that was how you had to type. If you have to type in CJK characters there is a frontend that converts them (I use kinput2 with wnn on *nix, and the built in frontend in BeOS.), and I'm sure that if the idea to have multinational chars succeeds, then some input method will be written to put them in unicode (as BeOS does by default). If you were going to a site that used CJK chars, then presumably you know the language, and know how to input them, and I bet that that assumption is built into their plan.
Here is some DNS server software that supports 8-bit data, no problem. Finding a compliant client resolver library is another matter, however...
Edith Keeler Must Die
oooo! i've test bedded a few non-english characters in my day! i just love those turks.
NAMBLA. Because Scouting can only take you so far.
Why is Network Solutions in charge of a potentially significant project? Does anybody trust them?
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I hope it doesn't crash my browser any more than normal. It crashes enought with multilangualge sites and in JS sites.
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if NSI starts accepting registration of internationalized domain names before these details are worked out, they are inviting trouble.
this is just another example of why .COM, .NET
and .ORG need to be taken away from NSI and
put in the hands of a group that will act
responsibly.
Oh this is just frickin' great...
Now I can get spam from domains with oddball characters that will just be about impossible to trace using standard tools.
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
What!? It's far more important to first of all support the nordic characters like å,ä and ö. And all keyboards can type it so why not?
.nu domains. They support all usual alphanumeric characters + å, ä and ö.
Chinese and Japanese characters can't be typed with Nordic/American keyboards, so that'
s just silly. For example, look at the
-Håkan
It's not the Spaniards that ICANN is catering to. It's those Uruguayans.
The fact is EVERYONE builds their systems for their needs. The fact also is that Americans lead the world in driving issues of I18N and L10N.
The whole idea behind this isn't to confuse the gigantic english-speaking crowd who uses the internet, it's to help the smaller group of non-english speaking people who have trouble navigating the internet or registering domains that are useful to them.
And it's "non-ASCII", not "non-English". There are already plenty of domain names that are non-English, as others have pointed out already. ASCII is a character set (of sorts); English is a human language. The differences are defined in detail in the requirements document for the IETF's working group.
Full details on the working group can be found at http://www.i-d-n.net. Maybe folks should consider reading the copious archives before declaring that it can't be done. It can be done, and hopefully it can be done right. We're quite sure that the Powers That Be in the IETF won't allow it to become a standard if it isn't right.
I am working as a IT tech in a multinational company, which happens to handle all sortz of domain registration. The reason for us to register under different character set is because it is easy for the people in that particular country to remember an address; but we also register an equivalent english name for that as well. Since the main point of the registration in different character set is simplcity for typical user who don't use English as their first/second language, it will be hard for them to remember any address in the first place.
Rather than trying to shoehorn international functionality into a system with limited, English-oriented semantics, the standards folks should be working an intuitive, international, squat-resistant layer above the current domain-name/URL conventions. It won't be easy to do, but there's got to be a better way to distinguish vaguely similar sites than panamahats.com versus panamá-se-expatria.com. (Apologies for my Spanish.)
By the way, does this mean that domain names will now be case sensitive? I've always thought that the resource part of a URL should never be considered case sensitive, even when they map to files on case-sensitive file systems. This was actually considered, but rejected on the grounds that case-mapping is ambiguous in some languages. If this is a legitimate issue, than internationalizing domain names is even more problematic than Docrates suggests.
Well, excuse me, I have to go register Amazon.com, aMazon.com, AMazon.com....
Expensive, yes
A pain for hard core geeks to get used to, yes
Necessary, hell yes! Pehaps not today, but soon.
I do see your point, but the same argument could be used against 16-bit computers (8-bits is the current standard and programs and data must be interoperable...)
Do you know how much creative spelling there is, simply to force non a-z characters into the DNS? Simply removing dots, rings and accents is not good enough. (oops sudddenly my domain name became equivalent to "www.faggot.com" or someone elses brand name)
Ever tried enforcing a "8 character a-z only" file name policy on a network where *some* servers and programs could not handle other names? Forget it. It was cheaper to dump those, buy a new network and microsoft products (as you can see this was after the dos days:-) even if tecnically inferior, than to handle the constant hassle.
People *hate* modifying spelling to comply with stupid limits. There is no standard way to map non a-z chars onto a dns
ASCII is outdated, get rid of it!
Either it will be done in a standardized way, or it will be done by Microsoft. I prefer the former.
All opinions are my own - until criticized
Not all of us are as lucky as European language speakers. Latin (font) based languages have the privilege to remove the accents from their characters and use plain Latin characters. Some languages like Greek and Russian are a bit less lucky, but they still have a usable (but ugly) mapping. Not all Russians can understand this mapping (most of the Russian population knows only one language). Hebrew and Arabic are completely out of luck. No reasonable mapping exist from these languages to Latin font. The same word can be written is several (wrong) ways if Latin fonts are used (remember squatting?). For example, the Hebrew word for shopping mall is Kenyon, but is written the same way as Canyon, so many (most) people pronounce it as Canyon. So if an internet mall wants to register itself it will have to register Canyon, Kenyon and Kanyon. Making Hebrew registration will help here. You may wonder why this has to be implemented in COM and ORG TLDs. I think it should not be implemented at this level (yet). Instead a standard should be prepared so that browsers, servers and other tools can handle the new domain (which will be deployed in local domains).
Well, actually it'd be vvv.domain.se which happens to be pronounced the same way as www.domain.se ("ve ve ve punkt domain punkt ess e"), because W is sort of treated as a "different looking" V when it occurs in proper names and such, for pronounciation and alphabetization purposes.
It depends on which Chinese character set you use (either traditional for Hong Kong and Taiwan or simplified for China)
For each character set there's a choice between a couple of input methods to map keystrokes from a QWERTY keyboard to the actual Chinese characters. I normally use a method called traditional Cangjei and here's how you type the URL:
twlb vfog vfbtv .mg jmso hodqn .dvii dttb .wong kar wai .(--org--)
w w w
Of course there are rules to generate the above if you know what the word looks like :-). However as you can see it's much more inconvenient that way, and anyone who thinks that the average person who doesn't know Chinese
typing would be able to reach their Chinese domain is being silly at the
least.
Keith So GnuPG fingerprint = 168F 874B 4E26 DCA8 B8BF 57F4 80F9 412E F82B AE4C
Uh? Who are you kidding? Looks like you have been smoking something fairly strong, lately (such as political propanganda).
"Non-profit organization": this term is such an oxymoron, anyway! As if any organization could last without somehow benefitting its members!
The whole DNS monopoly is a huge racket on the internet, anyway.
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
There are many Americans who understand internationalization issues very thoroughly, and some of them disagree with this proposal. It is a bad proposal because, first off, it really does not seem to understand internationalization issues. You do not accomplish I18N by using national character sets. Using an NCS is not making your content supported for an international environment. It is doing exactly the opposite. In many cases, there are half a dozen NCS that support the same damn alphabet. If you really want I18N, you need to use Unicode (preferably UTF8) or UCS.
If you are going to support multilingual domain names, resolution must occur in either Unicode or UCS. Let DNS lookup libraries handle the conversion from KOI-8 to UTF8. The user enters the domain in their NCS and the DNS server only has to handle one character set.
Beyond the issue of I18N, however, is the issue of who a TLD is targetted at. If .com is aimed at a global audience, then domains registered under that TLD should support a global audience: i.e. ASCII or ISO-8859-1. NOTHING ELSE. Let .ru use more of the unicode spectrum. Or even allow for a .ðî (that was the cyrillic letters for the first to characters in the Russian word Rossiya, in case your browser cannot resolve those) for domains aimed specifically at Russian speakers.
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All generalizations are false.
--
I like to watch.
DISCLAIMER I am a fag. But you are seriously *gay*.
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.
Now when I buy a product and need technical support, they can tell me that my keyboard isn't compatible with their web site! I knew this day would come! Brian Tobin
I dont have anything against other cultures, and dont mind other languages exsisting, in writing or on web pages... but DNS is NOT the place for them.
a domain name i supposed to be universally accessable. this is going to make a great many pains in the asses.
old browsers wont work
english keyboards lack accented characters
its not fun changing your charset, then punching in random alt+XXX codes until you match the CJK symbol your looking at.
the internet is really becoming dumb.
There was a nice (funny) scandal here in Spain a couple of years ago when the health ministry bought a new "computer system" which couldn't cope with the ñ (enye,\tilde{n},ñ,whatever). I don't know the details but it makes me wonder if its worth extending the system if (even) the government(s) will still be too clueless to use it. But at least it will be one less excuse for those who can't be bothered to accent correctly and blame their laziness on the machines.
i dont see how this would be possible without the modification of every name server in the world to support multibyte domains... since BIND 9 is in feature freeze... this might get in to BIND 10... look for betas in about 10 years.
wouldn't this choke most applications? im not entirerly sure how CJK are handled... doesnt seem to me like it would be a pop-in transition.
I assume we'll have some english letter translations? For example, ss (or some letter combo) for a symbol like the German ess-stet (or however you spell it.)? That looks like a capitol B, with a long tail on the left... alt-225 for those with ascii working...
If we don't, there will be a lot of people who can't access web pages. HOWEVER, this may be a good thing.. For example, Asians can keep Americans off their sites, and in the same context, we can use some spanish characters and keep them off. Interesting possibilities, but where do we go from here?
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
For those who are interested in IDN, here are some URL.
IETF IDN WG
http://www.i-d-n.net/
NSI Registry Testbed
http://www.nsiregistry.com/
i-DNS.net (Technology Provider for NSI ML.com testbed)
http://www.i-DNS.net/
Multilingual.COM Promotion
http://we-multilingual.com/
Mac OS 9 does this already, CJK (and other languages - indian ones and some others) are an optional install
I really don't think this is a good thing right now, unless you did something like map a unicode domain to a standard, limited characterset domain name.
Thats what I'd do anyway, but as the poster sugessted, the people who decided to do this probably don't know anything, since they decided to go by spesific languages, rather then unicode all at once.
But anyway, in my oppinion, this could really negatively impact the global nature of the internet, at least right now. I've got my computer rigged up to let me enter chinese characters, both simplified and traditional, but although I know how to read a little traditional chinese, I can't figure out how to type it in, this system would make it imposible for me to visit internet sites with those characters in the domain name, or it would at least make it difficult for me to type those URLS in. I, and many other people, could be cut off from parts of the internet that use character sets we don't know how to enter.
Domain names were designed the way they were for a reason, and I don't think its a good idea to go back on that....
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
a true stereotype judging from some of the posters here however
Im argentino (hablo castellano). In the case of spanish, I think the solucion is to allow accented chars in the name, but MAPPED in the unaccented chars. so you can type galeríacentral, and go to galeriacentral. that way the people can type the real word in spanish, an get the real site.
I'm from Argentina: Tango, Asado, Mate, Gaucho, Maradona, YPF
the ß is a bad example, because it actually is 2 letters: a long and a short 's', which is why it can be written as 'ss'.
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
However, if you had some kind of translation software that automatically mapped the local character set back to ASCII (and of course disallowed name clashes for the mapped names when registration occurred), it could be a win/win situation both for making the DNS more useful for non-english speakers, and keeping the net globally accessible.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
exactly, for example chinese.com... if written in chinese it could be 2 characters
One possible "solution" would be to treat differently-accented versions of a registered name as reserved. That is, if you register galeríacentral.com, you have first dibs (or more likely, right of first refusal) for galerìacentral.com and galeríacentrál.com.
That would help stop the copycatters a little.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
If my last name is Jönsson, I want to be able to use that in a domain, and not have to use Jonsson which is a completely different name. The same applies to lots of words, I estimate about 1/3 or 1/4 of all words in the swedish language have å ä or ö in them. These words are like second class citizens on the internet today, even when only used in a Swedish context.
Those who run the .nu domain wants to let those who registers domains use the å ä and ö characters (which are letters in their own right in Swedish and not accented letters), because .nu is used by lots of Swedes.
The major operators in Sweden don't like it, as it's not an international standard, so I think it's too early to say it "works".
If this becomes a standard, to be logical, then nobody from Sweden should be allowed to register a domain with "w" in it, as we don't have that character as a separate letter in our alphabet (any more).
I think it is about time we tossed out DNS when it comes to URLs. It is ridiculuous that so many millions of non-technical users are expected to use DNS. The further absurdity of the DNS systems application to URLs is realized by the endless "property" claims made by rich litigious corporations.
Why not use some kind of distributed, non-exclusive labeling system that lets IBM have the name "IBM". Maybe something LDAP based?
We are not going to get anywhere by patching up the DNS system a problem at a time. We need to engineer a new solution. I'm all for evolution but I don't want to wait for it to come up with something that works
No, i don't want to bookmark every site i visit.
No, i won't go to the site if i can't type it's address.
- What if they decide to host an english section?
- These addresses would be limited to small communities sites and would not help the fact that you have the opportunity to reach a gobal public as you said.
Actually, modern desktop computers all share a common character set: ASCII. Let's use it. Actually, this address is only an easier thing to remember than a numerical IP (XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX)...phobos% cat
phobos% cat
cat:
Yes, wooly mammoth does exist. You just have to use the correct, standard space character.
For more information, click here.
I have read about it on: http://www.spiegel.de but as far as I remember, it was only a doubtful claim by some politicans, who have a german special sign like ä,ö or ü in their names and could not register it without using substituions like ä --> ae and so on.
As far as I remember, the chairman of http://www.denic.de only laughed about this claim.
I think it would lead us to more problems than it would solve! Or is it just again about making $$?
Michael
English is not required in schools in India. (I'm an Indian, schooled in India). It's a different matter that most schools perceived as 'good' not only teach English but also teach everything else like science and arts in English. This is probably a colonial hangover but clearly a great advantage for those who can afford an English education. There's a strong business and employment bias against those who can't handle English but almost everyone I know would rather learn English and join in rather than struggle to change the world.
Unless I'm mistaken, Unicode is a combination of two ASCII characters to create a single one, which is how Japanese, Chinese, etc., characters are created. 255^2 is a lot of characters. (65025, to be exact.) Doesn't this mean that these domains are limited to 31 characters? Further, can BIND *support* using characters beyond [a-z0-9-.]? I sure wouldn't think that it could.
I didn't find these questions answered anywhere on ICANN or NSI's sites. Anybody have any ideas?
-Waldo
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Look, I'm panamanian. Spanish is my first language (it is Panamá, not Panama), but i just can't agree with this because i don't think it's practical at the moment. Take for example this web site we're building called galeriacentral.com. everyone knows automatically how to acces it when they hear an ad for it on the radio, but with the intl characters allowd, I would have to register galeriacentral.com, galeríacentral.com (correct form) and galerìacentral.com. and then someone would register galeríacentrál.com and i'd be screwed (cybersquattin is allowed in most parts of the world)...
.com/net/org are already abused enough to leave more room for stuff like slashdog.org.
my recomendation would be to leave it up to the countrlies TLD's. so if i want to register cualquiercosa.com.pa then ok, but the regular
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
What's preventing you from inputing CJK characters right now?
...namely, it's not yet practical. It may not be for a long time.
One, people talk about accented characters as being harder to recognize when spoken. While this is true, there's another problem, and one that's a lot tougher: there is no standard way to type these characters. On a Mac it's done one way (fairly intuitive, based on the character over which a given mark most frequently appears), on Windows it's done another way (an unnecessarily difficult process involving a four-digit keycode), and on Linux/Unix it's still another (I don't even know how it's done there).
Part of the reason the keyboard works so well is that it's at least semi-standardized; for the basic Roman character set I can move across platforms effortlessly. But when you start throwing diactiricals into the mix, I'm lost when I move from platform to platform. We need to solve that problem before we can even think of putting such characters in URL's. Can it be done? I think so.
Now, there's the problem of CJK characters in URL's. First of all, most computers aren't even capable of recognizing these without special software. As a result, the characters come out as a sequence of ASCII chars which if you're really lucky might all be printable. If you're not so lucky, the characters won't even be printable, or they'll be indistinguishable from one another so you still don't know what to type.
The answer here? Unicode (specifically UTF-8) helps, but many computers still don't support Unicode. Even in the case of those that do, I doubt there are any fonts which support every single character in the CJK set yet (remember, the Chinese character set in particular is truly vast; a two-byte encoding system is still insufficient for encoding all the possible characters). While all current operating systems can banage Unicode, many people are unable or unwilling to upgrade to current technology, and that's going to be a huge barrier to overcome (it may even prove insurmountable).
Supporting all the world's languages in URL's is a Good Thing. However, we have more than a few problems that we have to get through before we can accomplish that goal. The resources currently being spent on this project would be better spent solving those problems first.
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Yes, that sucks.
I get that crap to.
very trivial problems. Like how they should be able to type the characters in an URL on their keyboard that lacks key for these.
Like it or not, multinational domain names will tend to fragment the Internet, by making it harder for people from different backgrounds to communicate.
As it stands, English is a kind of common language for the Internet.
Yes, this is to some extent unfair - it gives an advantage to naitive English speakers over everyone else. I can see why this would bother people with other naitive languages.
It also brings the same advantage in international communication that Latin did to the international community of scientists hundreds of years ago - it makes it possible for everyone to communicate after learning only one new language, not fifty.
To some extent what is easy is what gets done; and making it harder for people from different countries to reach each other's Internet hosts will make it happen less.
Don't get me wrong - this is not an argument that international domain names are bad or should not be used. I have not discussed at all their formidable advantages. But the fragmentation I speak of is an unavoidable consequence; to ignore it is to fool oneself.
BTW, I'm a native Anglophone, and I could get along just fine without all of those accented characters. But there is no reason to expect the rest of the world to be happy with a character set defined by and for Anglophones, and I regard internationalization as long overdue.
English may be the lingua franca of the Internet, but that doesn't meant that we should be linguistic <godwin>facists</godwin>.
Currently, we have a global lingua-franca in the form of English, which requires that domain names and in some way URLs, use English and the appropriate characterset. In many ways, this brings people together around a common set of rules, yet still gives tremendous individual leeway.
By introducing domain names with national-characterset (and, make no mistake about it, the reason behind this is puirely profit-drive), you are introducing the equivalent of national barriers which will make it annoyingly difficult, if not outright impossible, for westerners to reach oriental websites (for example) - more so for Windows users, than Mac users (Macs have a majority of western characters accessible via pretty much any alphabetic keyboatd through simple, and intuitive keyboard combinations).
This must be the most incredibly stupid suggestion I have ever read.
Harry
Most people don't use latin. They use their native language for flowers and species. They should be able to do that on the internet as well.
And worldsnames.net also features Japanese characters, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Cyrillic.
Tho one of the nice "features" of the internet is the fact that you have the opportunity to reach a gobal public. Which is rather hard when you have country/language specific characters. my 0.02That's not the point...
revisionism is a state sponsored pastime in the
majority of the countires that will be using new
domain names.
The second point is that those "blockheaded
westerners" got and still get a lot of help from
people all over the world. To think the internet
is an American invention is to be ignorant of
both history and reality.
Thridly, those "blockheaded westerners" (NSI
primarlily) just don't get it... so it's time
for the innovation to happen where the need is.
As it happens, I-DNS arose out of Singaporian
research money.
Finally, If you think everything Internet has
alreadly been thought of, you're so desperately
wrong that you're probably not capable of
contemplating your belly-button.