Internationalized Domain Names Coming Soon

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 ... :-)"

Comments

Why not

[Pingular]

But I guess it would be difficult to talk about this on /., since it does not even support basic Latin-1
Just say the ascii number?

Re:Why not

[Golias]

Euro: 0x450x750x24

Accented a: 0x61

"gze" sound: 0x670x7a0x65

That was easy!

Re:Why not

[gnu-generation-one]

"Right... What's the ASCII code for the Euro sign? Or even accented "a"? How about the russian Gze?"

Simple, just cut-and-paste them from Word, like those fantastically useful ?intelligent quotes? you keep seeing on people?s websites

Oh great...

[JoeLinux]

Now the Europian Union will want everyone to click on the left side of the mouse, left-handers be damned.

The French will demand that "bandwidth exceeded" errors be renamed to "(web page) surrenders"

The Germans will try to take over the internet.

In a sneak attack, the Iraqis will launch a massive DDOS attack, but accidently hard-code localhost in the trojan. The Iraqi information guru will deny everything.

Re:Oh great...

[beebware]

Whilst us poor Brits will just do everything President Bush's lapdog (aka Tony Blair) tells us to do.

Taco, why did you remove the accents from slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

,
Taco est un mechant garcon.
'

Re:Isn't there a better way?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better still, why not just suck it up and get by with ascii? It only requires 1 byte per character, and is easy to memorize.

Accented characters are so Old World and passe, anyway.

Super Monkeys!

[Speare]

Any Internet RFC which includes the phrase, -with-SUPER-MONKEYS, has GOT to be good. (And in case you think I'm trolling, check the link.)

Re:FINALLY!

[arcanumas]

I'm glad to see that people other than Americans are being recognized on the internet. Which originally started as an American military project...

I am glad too see others than the Mesopotamians using the wheel which was originally invented for use in Mesopotamia.

USA!

[ekephart]

U.S.A.!!! U.S.A.!!! U.S.A.!!!

If it wasn't for us we'd all be speaking German. Wait.

[ducks]

Subject to Approval

[The_Systech]

Yeah, but did anybody get Al Gore's approval to make these changes?

it works fine on /.

[GillBates0]

- - - - ..
I, for one, welcome our new European overlords.

Because

[SweetAndSourJesus]

It's ve
r&#1 21; diff
ic&#117 ;lt t
o ty& #112;e 
like &#1 16;h
is

Re:Because

[Tackhead]

> It's v&#101 ;
r&#1 21; diff
ic&#117 ;lt t
o ty&; #112;e 
like & #1 16;h
is

An opportunity to quote one of my favorite bits of .sigfodder of all time:

Now, I knew this was coming, but that still didn't prepare me to actually see it. I'm looking at this thinking "You know, that couldn't be ANY MORE WRONG if it was in HTML with a .GIF of a psychotic nun in a bondage outfit clubbing a baby seal to death with an Al Gore doll." I mean, _ew_. Is that supposed to mean anything to ANYBODY? Can I put that address on an envelope and have it get delivered somewhere other than "Ampersand Incorporated"? WHAT IDIOT THINKS THAT THIS IS A GOOD IDEA?

Huey, on news.admin.net-abuse.email, commenting on the same issue, over two and a half years ago.

I can't wait

[nizo]

Personally I can't wait to see funky chinese character domain names in my web logs (mostly from infected windows machines trying to attack my apache server).

Re:Bad idea but bound to happen with todays thinki

[TomV]

thier
ludacris
femail
curce
mentaly

...after all, some people find just 26 letters and 0-9 hard enough already ;)

Re:FINALLY!

[cynicalmoose]

The internet was built as a highly decentralised, noncontrolled network, so that, in the event of a nuclear war, military leaders would have unrivalled access to pornography. (3DTIAB)

Babylon 5

[uberdave]

microsoft and microsoft for instance are two completly diffrent words.

Reminds me of that Babylon 5 episode when they find a person named Zathras down on this planet. Ivanova thought she had been talking to Zathras:

"No, that was not Zathras, that was Zathras. There are 10 of us, all of family Zathras, each one named Zathras. Slight differences in how you pronounce. Zathras, Zathras, Zathras.. You are seeing now?" - Zathras, Babylon 5: Conflicts of Interest

Re:Ah great...

[nsebban]

c'mon man ! you forgot the link ! BTW, DON'T CLICK HERE :)

Re:Isn't there a better way?

[defMan]

i18n-ified

internationalization-ified? Wow.

Re:A Step In The Right Direction

[geoffspear]

Bah. The ancient Greeks didn't need any accents, why should we?

Re:Ah great...

[ceejayoz]

I have modpoints right now, but I can't find the "-1, Dumbass" one... hmm...

Arrrgggh

[nnnneedles]

The intent is not for some human to be able to read it, but for all humans.

Ohhh the arrogance of americans.

Here's an example of why this is good. In sweden there is a town called Horby. That's 'o' with two dots over it. Their site has to be named 'horby' as it is now (without the dots). Horby means 'the village of whores' in swedish.

Do you think that billions of people who use other alphabets than the american one, are going to agree with anything you said in your post?

This change IS a big deal, not only for small towns, but for loads of big companies, government websites and all kinds of sites you can think of.

Re:Ah great...

[lisany]

Maybe he works for Verisign and is planning to hijack the domain "For the good of the Internet."