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Registrations Now Accepted For Asian Domain Names

Posted by timothy on from the aju-massi-sumnidad dept.

Eric Sun was among the first to point out that as of Thursday evening, VeriSign has begun accepting Chinese, Japanese and Korean domain names. "This increases the possible characters from 37 (26 letters, 10 numerals, and hyphen) to 40,282. Find more information [see this AP story]." snrsamy points to the same story as featured on C|Net . jamie suggests reading the technical lowdown at VeriSign.

4 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RFC by Megane · · Score: 4
    Okay, for the PDF challenged, it seems to not be an RFC, but to be compliant with the current RFC spec, in consideration of RFC2825, which points out that there is simply too much software out there which will break when given UTF-8 domain names.

    How it works is there is a special prefix "<rp>" (or maybe this just represents the prefix, I can't really tell from the PDF, but I didn't think < and > were valid domain name characters) that indicates a part of the domain is encoded, followed by the encoded name which only uses ASCII characters, and includes information about which character set was used (Unicode, SJIS, etc.). The algorithm is called RACE, Row-based ASCII Compatible Encoding.

    A couple of examples were given for both a domain name and a server name:

    <rp>45dfg62de34432.COM
    <rp>3df45gd345.<rp>45dfg62de34432.COM

    So I guess you can set your spam filters to block any domain starting with <rp>! :)

    --
    #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
  2. Re:English Based Systems sending E-Mail? by Speare · · Score: 4

    So how's this gonna work for systems not set up to handle the asian character set?

    Read the links.

    The proposal implements an ASCII encoding scheme, called RACE. A certain prefix (they list the debugging prefix as "bq-") indicates a RACE-encoded domain name.

    The rest of the ASCII encoding either appears in ASCII for dumb browsers, or is converted to Unicode or Big5 or whatever character set it wants.

    For "dumb browsers" (not a flame, just an indication of character-set-awareness), you'd see some crazy domain like http://www.bq-ag0970ag00ah07h.or.jp/; for "smart browsers," it would appear in your own kanji font.

    --
    [ .sig file not found ]
  3. English Based Systems sending E-Mail? by tomjgroves · · Score: 4

    So how's this gonna work for systems not set up to handle the asian character set? Lets say I want to send to joe.bloggs@somechinesename.net from my FBSD or Linux boxes? Not too much fun, I think...

  4. Big5 or Unicode by Giant+Robot · · Score: 4

    How is this going to work? Since the majority of chinese users input their chinese as big5,
    (eg www.ê.com) will not be the same as the unicode equivalent..