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:Of little use

[Anonymous Coward]

I would bet the average German Internet user knows how to do that. It's pretty easy when the key is on your keyboard: http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~tphillip/GermanKeyboar dLayout.html

Security minded questions

[merc]

Will having non-ASCII data in FQDN's open us up to buffer-overflow attacks in various network-aware services?

Some Unanswered Questions About IDNs ...

[Ron Bennett]

Below is a quick copy and paste from one of my posts on DNForum regarding IDNs ... I own some IDNs and believe they have much potential, but there are still many unanswered questions...

Excerpt from a post of mine on DNForum regarding IDNs:
http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?p=732080

I'm running into a lot of issues that many IDN folks aren't discussing - probably because they've not consider them ...

Various issues / threats / questions:

?? The existance of numerous diverse dialects, even totally different languages, etc in the same country ... it's among the reasons that English dominates in some areas; some natives, even if they can understand a particular dialect, will sometimes speak a totally non-native language, such as English, instead to avoid risk of offending the other party. One can't assume one language dominates an entire region - languages can also overlap many areas ... it's one of the reasons some are pushing for language / culture based TLDs, such as .CAT (among the dumbest ideas ever, but that's another discussion for the .CAT thread running here on DNF).

?? An IDN that contains western european characters that very close matches a non IDN ... ie. cafe.com verses café.com ... what happens? Will the IDN be highlighted / blocked by default? ... likely an easy UDRP target? ... introduction of a new IDN specific dispute procedure? -perhaps there already is one?

?? Trademark issues ... ie. an IDN that is similar / exact to a trademark in another country ... less obvious, what about an IDN that translates to that of a trademarked word / phrase? -I believe there's a thread discussing such an issue now on one of the other boards here.

?? language variants (more applicable to asian languages, etc) related issues ... how good / stable are the various language variant tables?

?? what happens when a language variant table changes? -how are conflicts handled?

?? what happens if a character variant (an IDN [IDL package] technically can comprise multiple character variants [code points]) is released? ... does the current registrant get first dibs? ... even if yes, it may not be quite that simple if a character variant occurs in numerous permutations.

?? What happens if a reserved character variant is changed to a preferred character variant? - while such a change would have little to no effect on affected IDNs (IDL packages), it could result in the appearance of some IDNs changing ... probably not a biggie compared to some other issues, but one to be aware of.

?? How reliable, especially for those in languages with numerous character variants, will IDN domain resolution be? ... IDN resolution depends on much client-side APIs.

?? How well will IDN resolution APIs be regulated ... I can easily envision scenerios in which a web browser and/or other applications (email, IM, etc) implement resolution differently ... ie. adding and/or ignoring one or more valid language associations for a particular IDN / converting similar-looking western european characters to standard A-Z characters, etc. A related concern is language table management - I'm a little hazy on if the tables will be internally stored by each app or remotely loaded for each session, etc.

Rambling on, but there are a lot of things that one needs to be aware of with IDNs.

Balkanising the internet?

[hcdejong]

Would this lead to segregation of the internet into zones defined by the language used for the domain name? At the moment, I can access e.g. Japanese websites easily, even if the content of that site is in a language I don't understand [1].
If non-Roman domain names become popular, will I still be able to access them, or will they disappear behind untypeable URLs? A search engine may be able to mitigate this problem somewhat, but ATM I sometimes get search results for Japanese-language pages only because my search term is present in the URL.

1: yes, a site can still be useful in this case and no, despite the stereotype it's not just for porn.

Re:Balkanising the internet?

[badasscat]

Imaging all the Japanese who don't know English, but have to learn/type english domain names. Very unintuitive for them.

Bad example.

The Japanese are probably the *least* likely of any non-English speaking country to use non-roman url's. The fact is the standard Japanese keyboard is the same exact QWERTY keyboard we use. They can type Japanese through software, which is how they normally work when writing to each other, but there's nothing "non-intuitive" in using an English keyboard in the way that it was intended. In fact, most of them write Japanese using romanizations, then select the correct kanji through a list. So they're universally familiar with romanized url's, and like any habit, it's not going to change just because an alternative became available. Typing kanji is harder on a Japanese computer than typing a romanization.

Now, the Chinese, Russians, etc. I don't know about, so there could be better examples out there of people who would take advantage of this.

Romanization as DNS lingua franca

[StreetStealth]

Couldn't these linguistically-heterogenous domain spaces still be universally linked through romanization? I see one possible solution: An intermediary DNS conversion server; i.e. type "[those were supposed to be Japanese kanji].co.jp" and your DNS request is treated the same as "rakuten.co.jp". Beyond the inability to rake in tons of money for new registrations, what might be the disadvantages of such a system?

Re:Romanization as DNS lingua franca

[Nimey]

For some languages, like Arabic, there is no one standard for romanization. A trivial example is Qu'ran/Koran.

Already done

[kahei]

Once again, committees lag behind actual problems and actual solutions.

Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to browsing .jp.

(I seem to recall that /. has issues of its own, so the ascii encoding of that would be http://xn--cckev5k8eta5k.jp/. Anyway, the point is that characters beyond ASCII have been used for ages. Mostly by people who don't mind it when users from other countries can't access their site.)