First Non-Latin TLDs Go Online Today

eldavojohn writes "ICANN today switched on the country code top level domains for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, which are the first non-Latin TLDs available and are also fully readable right to left. Slashdot does not support them but you can find the TLDs in the BBC article. ICANN said it had 21 more requests for TLDs in 11 different languages. A quick note — if you do not have the language packs installed, you may experience unpredictable browser behavior in the URL bar. Right now countries like China and Thailand have implemented workarounds to achieve the same effect."

Comments

Re:Seriously?

[Anonymous Coward]

they didn't break backwards compatability,
here's the brilliant standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
it's just awesome.

Re:Why not post example

[tot]

The ICANN blog has a working link.

Re:Why not post example

[chill]

Here you go: http://xn--4gbrim.xn----rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx

Re:Good news everybody!

[leuk_he]

Yes you can slashdot them, but you cannot show a correct text-. Yet...

Re:Seriously?

[tlhIngan]

Is it chauvinistic that I find this insane?
I wouldn't mind if they used an escape character sequence and then mapped other alphabets to strings of Latin characters, but actually breaking backwards compatibility...

Except there *IS* an escape sequence. And the actual representation is in standard latin alphabets.

The reason is that browsers can detect the escape sequence and interpret the rest of the URL as a unicode string.

The escape is "xn--" - domains using it have xn--domain, TLDs as xn--TLD. Use both and they both have to be escaped - xn--blah.xn--blahtld.

The trick for the Rest of Us is to be able to set that as "off" by default to keep these xn-- sequences from looking like normal latin characters. The good news is the encoding is such that Paypal and the like don't get rendered as xn--paypal.com and such, but xn--junk_that_renders_as_paypal.com.

Internationalized domain names have been around a few years. This is just an internationalized TLD using the same DNS-friendly encoding scheme.

Been done for a longtime

[DrYak]

This has been dome for a long time (spelling paypal with similarily looking cyrillic characters. i.e.: "raura" but in cyrillic. or "eVau" for "eBay").
Most browsers circumvent it by either displaying the escaped characters (a.k.a. Punny Code) or by using a different colour to tag non-lating characters (don't know which browser uses this technique).

The current difference now, is that the top-level domain, too could be done in non-latin caracters.

i.e.: up until now, the hacks only spellt "PayPal" with seemilarily-looking cyrillics. starting from today a new TLD could be created which looks like "com" but is instead cyrillcs ( "som" in this instance )

Browsers will simply react by showing the escaped form or flag the letters with a different colour.