Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

First Non-Latin TLDs Go Online Today

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the is-klingon-in-there dept.

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."

12 of 302 comments (clear)

  1. Non-latin TLDs? by kvezach · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Non-latin TLDs? by C0vardeAn0nim0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      this a boon for russian scamers.

      some letters in russian cyrillic look like latin characters but have different uses. example, the cyrillic character that looks like a "C", is actually aquivalent to "S", their "H" is actually our "N". so a TLD ".som" in cyrillic would be seen on the screen (and understood by westerners) as ".com".

      so here's my suggestion to firefox developers: put some easy to see visual clue on the address bar to tell exactly in which language or character set the URL is written in.

      --
      What ? Me, worry ?
  2. Fragmenting and such... by Unka+Willbur · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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."
    1. Re:Fragmenting and such... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When the 7 Billion people around the globe will be speaking Standard English, then you may have a point. Until then I think it is everybody's right to use his/her native/preferred language on the Internet, including in TLDs. I speak 5 languages and Arabic is my native language and I think that today is a great day for the Internet.

    2. Re:Fragmenting and such... by melikamp · · Score: 4, Insightful

      but the internet is a nation with its own language

      Yeah, but it's not English, it's TCP/IP. And DNS is not even an integral part of the Internet, but rather a layer on top, used mostly for the WWW part. Many peer-to-peer applications would work just fine even if DNS was never created.

    3. Re:Fragmenting and such... by eldavojohn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ridiculous tribalism, that's all it is.

      Well, then as the submitter, I regret tagging it with "culture."

      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!

      Huh, as a developer I had always assumed that we wrote software to help people. Not that people changed their behaviors and customs to be able to use our software. I guess I was wrong. I find it disturbing that a polyglot like yourself can so easily dismiss an engineering challenge as "ridiculous" and "shenanigans" because all it takes to get around it is for everyone in the world to learn my language of takes.

      I find it humorous that we sit here and rail for interoperability and satisfying the consumer and no DRM and open standards ... only to turn around and call something that opens up the internet to the rest of the world "ridiculous."

      If this is the consensus among geeks, what a shame it is to be a geek.

      Where do you stand on the effort that went into the Linux language packs? Were those ridiculous tribalism as well when someone took the time to make them?

      --
      My work here is dung.
  3. This is just like .xxx by drumcat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. you're not thinking the issue through by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:you're not thinking the issue through by wvmarle · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not necessarily.

      Since sometime back in the '90s the web site www.ilse.nl was founded: a search engine that would index Dutch language sites only. Very useful for those that speak Dutch. Luckily for us Dutch we don't need a different character set, we can get along with the limits of Latin just fine. When it came to searching for Dutch language sites it was the number one choice. And so there are a few more, www.startpagina.nl is another very popular one.

      Wikipedia comes in lots of languages - but I have never heard anyone here shout "fragmentation! Less freedom!" about that. Even though most of those other languages are inaccessible to them. But then English is inaccessible for a large part of the world, and the vast majority of people still prefers to use their native language. And that preference continues online. Even though they may be proficient in English.

      I can actually imagine that the English language in the long term becomes a minority language. After all there are more native Chinese speakers than native English speakers in this world. There are probably even more non-English speakers than that there are English speakers, and in this case not even talking about native English speakers.

  5. Re:Seriously? by Philip+K+Dickhead · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh C'mon! Jesus used the Aramaic alphabet.

    Shakespeare wrote in a "diffyrente waye", with an alphabet that included letters like the "thorne" - a "th" that is frequently mistaken for a "y" - hence our ridiculous "Ye Olde".

    As for Homer Simpson? I don't believe he can write very much at all.

    --
    "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
  6. Re:Thats all good by HiVizDiver · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Don't you mean HTTPVS/URLVS?

  7. Re:Really? by phantomcircuit · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.