International URLs Pass First Test

Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports on the results of a successful test of non-ASCII domain names on Internet-equivalent hardware (pdf) carried out last October. The next stage is to plug the system into the net, and if it still works, it could go live sometime next year. 'Early work on the technical feasibility of using non-English character sets suggested that the address system would cope with the introduction of international characters tests were called for to ensure this was the case ... Also needed are policy decisions by Icann on how the internationalised domain names fit in and work with the existing rules governing the running of the address books. Icann is under pressure to get the international domain names working because some nations, in particular China, are working on their own technology to support their own character sets.'"

Comments

Re:Great

[mosburn]

That's what the cheesy lines at the beginning are for, typical pizza boy/plumber/etc. to get you going as your intro to a new language.

Re:Maybe not..

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

While browsers can't even properly show non-english alphabet, this doesn't seem to be a good a idea. My native language contains many special characters and I usually end up deciphering the emails sent by mom to me, because along the way, servers replace these characters with funny things. Well is it the browsers or the servers that are the issue? AFAIK any modern browser fully supports Unicode and any other encodings so there shouldn't be an issue there. If the servers are the problem then either it's the protocol that needs updating/replacing (I don't know nearly enough about SMTP, IMAP4, or POP3 protocols to comment) or the servers themselves are non-compliant. If there's a problem it should definitely be fixed, but you really need to know what the problem is first.

They could split unicode into sections

[Colin Smith]

Call them, say, "character sets.

Then only allow names and queries all from the same character set.

English "X" vs. Cyrillic "khah"

[J.R. Random]

This is just common sense -- there's no reason why Chinese, Greeks, and Russians should have to use a character set meant for the English language. But any given URL should have a language associated with it and any character in that URL not associated with its language should be color coded. So English language URLs would get "omicron" flagged while Greek URLs would get "O" flagged. The "default" language could be English so that existing URLs are unchanged, for other languages their ISO code could precede the URL. Now this particular scheme might have some fatal flaw but something similar ought to be workable.

Re:English "X" vs. Cyrillic "khah"

[pavon]

Agreed, although I think a dialog box should also be shown as an annoyance / deterant. Otherwise just imagine what the Web 2.0 folks will do when they realize they can redirect their site to one with cool multi-colored URLs, thus conditioning people to ignore the colored warning. And you thought del.icio.us was overly cute :)

Re:What about security issues?

[JanneM]

Like you already have with "l", "I" and "1"; or "O" and "0"; or "V" and "U", depending on the particular font you happen to use?

Phishing attacks mostly works not because people can't see a minute difference between two lookalike letters; they work because as long as nothing is utterly obviously, grossly out of order people just assume they're in the right place. You can have domain names that aren't even close to the real one, and websites with only superficial similarities to the original and a lot of people will still be duped.

Re:Great

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure most porn sounds are the same in any langauge.

Nuh, Japanese porn girls sound like they are crying and/or in agony when they are having sex. Quite a turn off unfortunately.