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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.'"
A URL is an entire address, including the protocol, local path and fragment identifier. This is a URL:
A domain name does not include the protocol, the local path or the fragment identifier. This is a domain name:
This is talking about domain names, not URLs. If anybody would talk about multilingual URLs, it would be the IETF, not ICANN, and they already have, they are called IRIs.
The .test domain and the example.com address are specifically reserved for testing (anddocumantation example) purposes. There's an RFC somewhere. How silly to use something else!
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That would be Chinese and Japanese - top to bottom, right to left.
Japanese writing has pretty much been converted to the western left to right style. Formal government documents and newspapers are written that way and in day-to-day life in Japan one will rarely encounter top to bottom writing except in traditional restaurants, certain stylized ads and museums. You actually encounter it less than outright English (English is very popular in ads see http://www.engrish.com/ ), which few people read.
My brief trip to China seemed to indicate that they've done the same thing there.
It's not an issue.
You're right, Chinese text is frequently printed horizontally left to right. Most frequently from my experience. None of the Chinese language newspapers I've seen here in Southern California use vertical text. The only time I've seen vertical text was in formal situations.
Chinese text can also be seen written horizontally from right to left on some old signs and buildings. This comes from before horizontal writing was common and is actually a special case of vertical printing where there is room for only one row of characters.
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There's an RFC somewhere.
RFC 2606, Section 3. It's referenced at (where else) example.com.