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Internationalized Domain Names Coming Soon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the untypable dept.

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 ... :-)"

7 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. Isn't there a better way? by CTalkobt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It looks to me like the problem is that the DNS servers don't support unicode so they're using a bad implementation of it.

    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?

    --
    There's a gorilla from Manilla whose a fella that stinks of vanilla and has salmonella.
    1. Re:Isn't there a better way? by pawal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There are _so_ many applications using the domain name system that feeding UTF-8 through it will break most of them. Except for perhaps Internet Explorer.

      The registries using UTF-8 (most notably .NU) are running IDN in parallell with UTF-8 now.

      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/ 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.

  2. really dumb sounding by happyfrogcow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sorry, is it just me or do they seem to be taking a bad shortcut to get to a good end? It doesn't seem like they are doing this correctly. Why not plan to migrate to unicode? Their choice seems shortsighted and flawed. I hope they atleast considered unicode and came up with real reasons why not to use it.

  3. Useful? Naw. by grub · · 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.

    --
    Trolling is a art,
  4. Maybe not as useful as one might believe by Ryu2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    While it's logical for, say, Chinese companies to have a Chinese domain name and Chinese e-mail addresses, it may not be the best choice if the company wishes to expand oversea.

    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.

    --
    There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
  5. Well... it's still not perfect by Krach42 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ok, so you're mostly guarenteed a domain name if you own the trademark on the name. (To prevent cybersquatters right?)

    Well, what about the .jp domain? How can they possibly handle this, since in Japan you cannot copyright latin characters. (Or at least as far as I've heard)

    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?

    --

    I am unamerican, and proud of it!
  6. This is important.. by k98sven · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just to diverge, I'd like to represent the non-english speaker view here.

    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.
    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.