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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."
China and Thailand have implemented workarounds to achieve unpredictable browser behavior in the URL bar?
It is now possible to get a domain that cannot be slashdotted!
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...
Why did the BBC article not include a link to a valid non-latin URL so we could see how our browsers cope? Even if the page is not understandable, it would be nice to know that the pages load.
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."
I have and use .info and .name domains too, but have not seen any problems with them (yet). Maybe some programs don't check RFC-822 (or whatever it is called nowadays) addresses as they should, but this is not new.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
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.
For the inhabitants of Mönsterås, Sweden.
The town name means 'patterned ridge', but to date they've have had to put up with the domain "Monsteras" - which means "monster-carcass".
(å, ä, ö/ø in the Scandinavian languages are considered to be their own unique characters, not accented 'a's and 'o's.)
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.
i'm not at all implying that other people care about USA-centric crap, but i'm saying they most definitely are interested in tech that often starts in the usa
there's also the network effect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
more people using a given website simply makes it more compelling, because how many people are in a given social website often defines how useful that site actually is. this renders languages other than english at an automatic, and continuing, disadvantage
even internet tech that started outside the usa, if it gained an international following, say the chan message boards from japan (4chan), icq in israel, or chatroulette in russia, they all migrated to the english web as an inevitable aspect of becoming an international success, and even though they of course have multilanguage abilities and continue to be used in multilanguage ways, their english manifestations are their largest elements
then there is the bizarre phenomenon of paleolithic tech that gets born in the usa, and mostly forgotten there, but continues to live on in other areas
google's orkut started in the usa, but faded, but is huge in brazil, and also india. google relocated orkut from california to belo horizonte
remember friendster? its still alive and well in malaysia, philippines, indonesia. a malaysian company in fact recently purchased friendster
all i'm saying is we're talking about technology, not culture, and no one believes that being usa-centric is the point or even an aspect of being rooted in the english language
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The site in the ICANN blog worked for me in both Safari and Firefox, in the Windows XP and OSX versions of both. Both Safari and Firefox showed Arabic in the text on the tab, but only Safari showed Arabic in the address bar.
Where can I go to register a site in squibbly? ÷ :]
GENERATION O98346: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig and remove a random number from the generation. T
As I maintain my own DNS servers and such, I was curious how this worked. Here's what I learned with 15 minutes of research:
My first stop was to see the root.zone and I looked for these new TLDs, curious to see how they would show up in a Latin-based zone file. Ah, I spotted these odd XN-- zones and then knew what to dig into more.
Take for instance (I pasted a Unicode domain, but Slashcode won't show it) which is handled by ns[1-3].dotmasr.eg.:
$ dig ns (Unicode domain)
; > DiG 9.6.2-P1-RedHat-9.6.2-3.P1.fc12 > ns (Unicode domain) ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;.(Unicode domain) IN NS ;; ANSWER SECTION:
. 3600(Unicode domain) IN NS ns1.dotmasr.eg.
. 3600 (Unicode domain)IN NS ns2.dotmasr.eg.
. 3600(Unicode domain) IN NS ns3.dotmasr.eg.
If you look in the root.zone file, you will see that the ASCII/Latin version of this zone is really XN--WGBH1C.:
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS1.DOTMASR.EG.
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS2.DOTMASR.EG.
XN--WGBH1C. NS NS3.DOTMASR.EG.
TLD Reserved Domains has a list of the current mappings. ToASCII and ToUnicode are the methods to convert back and forth which links to RFC 3490 which has the nitty gritty details.
(meh, Slashcode doesn't support Unicode encoding, but I can see the Unicode domain name I am pasting in before I hit Preview in Firefox)
Also, the whole switching from right to left in Latin characters to left to right in some Unicode is odd when trying to edit!
of posting what you just wrote in english, on a usa-started and hosted website
as a dutchman though, you are very much within the western world, which is even more english dominated than the wider world, and your perfect english is an example of that
but as i a sit here in midtown manhattan staring out at brooklyn (from breukelen in utrecht), read about the yankees baseball team (from jon quesa: "johnny cheese", how the dutch derisively referred to the english dairy farmers), and contemplate all the kills in the area (creeks), and all the roosevelts in our presidencies, i know that linguistic and cultural influence is a very relative thing indeed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]