Slashdot Mirror
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."
But they will still need Latin characters to type "http://"
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.
Well, hooray for a more fragmented Internet. While every keyboard can type A-Za-z, that's not true of Chinese or Arabic, so sites using those TLDs will be effectively off-limits to those that aren't "native". Sure, the sites can also register an ordinary domain name, but then why not just use that domain name to begin with?
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...
Ridiculous tribalism, that's all it is. Fragmentation of the Internet to appease some regressive, regional e-peenery is the stupidest idea to date. I speak 8 languages and love some, like Russian immensely, but the internet is a nation with its own language, and that language is Standard English. I call shenanigans on anything else being shoehorned into its basic infrastructure!
"Remember when I said I would never lie? Well, that was the first time."
Guess what -- this will all get blocked. More fragmentation = less free internet. Here comes Sharia law that says all internet usage must be in Farsi, and all websites with latin endings will be blocked. Weak.
currently people are not getting on the internet because its all in english: it serves as a barrier and they see no reason to even try
but when the internet supports their native language, they get on the internet, get a taste of it, like it, want to use more it, and inevitably this drives them to the english web, since there's more of whatever they're looking for over there
in other words, the long term effect of supporting other languages on the web is paradoxically further and faster consolidation to english
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Now to axe the latin protocol prefix, colon, slashes and dots. Also, what about those with disabilities- it is visual after all. We need "thought domains"- but wait, what about those with impaired mental capacities? Domains by intuitition would work. But what about parallel universes! Argh.
You realize that now every Anonymous Coward is a target, right?
Thanks a lot.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Just for anybody who is interested and lazy... javascript:alert(unescape("http://www.bankofam%u212ercia.com"))
It doesn't look exactly like 'e', but it's certainly close enough to fool some people.
TFS said Slashdot doesn't support those URLs. That doesn't mean the rest of the internet can't.
Do that to ebay.com paypal.com, etc.... It opens up a world of unholy hell for all the scammers on this planet to make it even harder to determine if a site is real or fake....
Thanks ICANN!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.