ICANN Mulling Multilingual URLs

griffjon writes "The Washington Post is reporting that ICANN is testing out fully multilingual domain names. These won't just be [non-western-language].com, but would have TLDs translated into other scripts, fixing annoyances for non-English speaking audiences. An example: 'Speakers of Hebrew, Arabic and any other language written from right to left must type half of the URL in one direction and the other half — the .com, .net or .org postscript — the opposite way.' Let's hope it goes better this time around: 'Next week's experiments use the domain name "example.test" translated into 11 languages. A previous model, however, used "hippopotamus" instead of "test." These plans went awry when an Israeli registrar realized the Hebrew word ICANN thought meant "hippopotamus" was an expletive and threatened to involve the Israeli government.'"

Comments

Multilingual URLs...

[It doesn't come easy]

Well hippopotamus me, what will they think of next?

Re:Multilingual URLs...

[Rob T Firefly]

Meh, they can all go example themselves.

More info here

[Anonymous Coward]

xc.estaog//:ptth

I am registering

[dotpavan]

http://org.slashdot/ or is it org.dotslash://http or org.dotslashcolon://http or.... ah, hippo it!

Well, uh, we could click

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a fair comment - how do we deal with languages we don't know and can't even type? Let's see, I'd say somebody should really come up with a way to get to a site on the Internet without having to type some moon language that has letters that aren't even on my keyboard. Maybe there could be some other input device we could use, maybe this little hand-held rodent-looking device just to the side of my keyboard. I've always wanted a use for it.

Maybe if I did a search for something, and the answer is in one of those "other" languages written by those "other" people, maybe I could somehow click some kind of--I don't know--maybe a representation of that site, using my rat or squirrel or whatever these new-fangled devices are called. Then of course I'd like to be able to save this transportation capability for future use; if only there were a way to save some kind of cyber-bookmark in my browser, to keep my place without having to type in all those funny characters ever again. I think I have some ideas, but I need to contact my patent attorney first.

Oh, no. Wait. I just thought of something bad. You know, when I actually get to this site, it's probably going to be really hard to understand what's written on the page. Funny squiggles and such. I suppose there's really just no reason for me to go to such a page, if I can't read it anyway, so why even bother? Plus "they" probably don't know anything good anyway, but there's always a chance that "they" might be more intelligent than we thought. If only there were some site that provided a service that could help me translate this page, then maybe, just maybe, I'd be Ok with allowing these foreign-speaking visitors to spread their native language like some kind of disease all over "my" Internet. If only...

Re:Domain name != URL

[Phisbut]

Sounds like something that the Canadian government would embrace. There's rules for government websites that the url must be bilingual, so the directory path and file names must be mirrored to create the same structure in both French and English. The loophole in the rules is that you don't have to provide multiple directories and folders where the name isn't linguistic, such as calling your file 1243.html, or ESADOFE.html.

Ah, but that's where you're wrong my friend. Like it or not, "1234.html" can be expanded to "1 2 3 4 . HyperText Markup Language", which can then be translated to "1 2 3 4 . Langage Balisé HyperTexte" and then back to "1234.lbht", so you can't even escape the bilingual requirements with non-words html files.

Unless of course you make your website using only PHP scripts, which is lucky because it's a palindrome (and a recursive one like we geeks all like our acronyms), and the "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" translates to "Préprocesseur Hypertexte PHP" and then back to PHP, so 1234.php would be ok. PHP is a bilingual recursive acronym, making it Canada-proof.

Don't get me started on .cgi, .asx and .pl, cause things could get ugly.