Slashdot Mirror
ICANN Approves Internationalized Chinese Domain Names
philalethiac writes "Millions of Chinese language users will soon be able to access the Internet using Chinese script following a decision today by ICANN's Board of Directors to approve a set of Chinese language internationalized domain names."
! ("shou3" = number one; "biao1" = to announce/post)
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
ICANN haz internationalized Chinese domain name?
I guess, until Slashdot enables the UTF character set like everyone else has for the past decade or so,
1. There will be some domain names that we can't link to on Slashdot
2. No one will get my First Post joke.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
I have heard conflicting information about this. I know the new ccTLDs for China (they approved two - traditional and simplified) are aliases for each other (resolve to the same sites), but are they also both aliases for the existing cn ccTLD or do they resolve to an entirely new domain? If they are separate, why did they choose to do it this way? It seems like it would only cause confusion.
Oh, and damn slashdot and it's lack of unicode support. It would be nice to be able to type the damn things when talking about them.
Does this mean I can pester ICANN for a TLD using the ancient Nordic Futhark? Or does the board have members that would be opposed to the casting of runes?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I swear slashdot needs a "-1 you're a bloody nuisance" mod option.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
With all the non latin address character sets being approved I imagine there is a world of new opportunities which completely void all the "inspect the address bar" education which was pushed on the general public for so many years. ICANN has managed to turn the net into a pretty much anything goes place, almost every major company is practically extorted into buying the new extension flavour of the month to prevent spammers and fraudsters sending seemingly legitimate email and the general public is left completely confused with no guiding address principals.
So will browsers start supporting vertical address bars, in addition to left-to-right and right-to-left?
Sorry to editorialize, but it's amazing how worked up the Americans and French get over the intrusion of foreign languages, considering they've done more than anyone to change how the rest of the world speaks and writes.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Americans don't get worked up over the intrusion of other languages, we just thing that everyone in the world should speak English as a 2nd language.
Sure, there'll be some Americans who will get worked up, but for the most part it is not a deep held belief.Its not like we require people to speak English; many government forms are available in many, many languages. Its not uncommon for larger cities to have areas where advertising is in Spanish or on of the many Asian languages.
This looks like a perfect opportunity to highlight this recent post at the Pinyin News blog, closely related to the issue at hand! (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the blog in any way, but as a former student of Japanese I can relate to the general message.)
You might have missed it for the last little while, but English is pretty much the defacto trade language anywhere you go. But no, people don't get worked up over the intrusion of foreign languages into English. English in itself is highly mailable, which is why it's considered a trade language. French on the other hand, gets bent out of shape because they see it as pollution of the language. They're all about purity.
Om, nomnomnom...
But in China nobody actually reads top to bottom anymore. What's more, they use the same punctuation marks and numbers that we do in general.
Looks like the domain names will be encoded using punycode instead of the cleaner UTF8 encoding:
.jp" in Romanji. That way you can still cater to a local/regional audience, and still allow everyone else in the planet to reach you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web, and imposes regional barriers. Your mail client and mail server software might not be too happy with you trying to send an e-mail to "joe@.jp" or "joe@.jp-r14k153opxc" in punycode. (Crap, it looks like slashdot does not accept international characters in comment submission, so you can't read this: "日本人".)
Remember that very few people have rendering and fonts for every written language on the planet, so most people will be cut off from many websites.) With the current IPv4 shortage, one can no longer reliable just use an IP address to access a specific website, e-mail address, etc., since a single IP address can host many domain names.
Personally I think that the best compromise solution would be to only allow non-ascii characters for domain names in different languages if there are submitted with a paired up romainization version that can be equally accepted for the same domain. So using my previous example, one could equally specify ".jp" in Japanese Kanji, ".jp-yn9d427hcvb" in punycode, or "nihonjin
For those that argue that it does not matter if a domain name is only specified in a foreign language, if all of the hosted content is in the same foreign language forget about all of current International collaboration in Mathematical, Scientific, Engineering, Programming, and other fields. (You can write an entire math proof or software program using only symbols without a single human word.)
Even for individual one-on-one e-mail communications between people in different countries that are able to communicate in a common language this would still be a problem, since a large percentage of e-mail accounts are hosted with a user's local ISP, that in future may leave them stuck with a non-ASCII e-mail address that would cut them off from the rest of the world.
Reserved only for people who bitch about how Slashdot needs some mod option or another.
I swear slashdot needs a "-1 you're a bloody nuisance" mod option.
I dunno, I think he deserves at least a little credit for the phrase "AWESOME STEAMING HOT MARXISM!!!"
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Will ICANN accept both simplified and traditional Chinese scripts?
AWESOME STEAMING HOT MARXISM!!!!!!!!!!!
ROFL! Please mod this funny. I think I just shit my pants (made in China of course).
Wow, I'm surprised he managed to make to the end of that rant without drowning in his own spittle!
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Everything that's even remotely interesting on the Internet is either blocked in China or English language. Native Chinese sites is nothing but censored propaganda anyway.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
While I don't like to raise too much sturm und drang about it, as a native English speaker I must still take some affront at the chutzpah with which these dirty foreigners waltz into our tongue, thinking they have carte blanche to sully our language.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As a person who can read/write Japanese(similar to, but a bit different from Chinese) characters, I don't know why ICANN thought this was a good idea. It's not like the actual contents of pages had to be in Latin characters, so "Allowing use of other languages" is not really an issue. Only the address had to be in Latin characters.
Having all internet users use the 26 (x2 for capitals) letters of the Latin charset and 10 numbers is a much, much simpler than having everyone try to learn all the letters of all the character sets out there.
This is going to make administration harder.
If you started getting hacking attacks from .com, would you even know how to type that into your firewall? If you got an email from @.com, do you think you could describe the address over the phone to a colleague? From the preview, it appears Slashdot is filtering out Japanese characters I used for the addresses. The above examples would be tokyo.com and shujin@osaka.com if they were forced to be in latin. And that's something that's usable by both Japanese and foreigners, whereas the Japanese-character addresses are for 'Japanese only'.
I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
You forgot to post anonymously. You need to do that when you're trolling. Remember that next time, you arse licking sperm face.
"Americans and French" "worked up" about "the intrusion of foreign languages"?
I'm looking up and down this whole thread and I don't see any evidence of what you're saying. Or maybe you're just anti-American/French and are projecting your own opinions onto others?
Besides, language is about communication. It doesn't matter how it gets done, just that it gets done. Sure the world has hundreds of languages around, but in today's world, english is the common language that binds the world together. If that hurts some people's egos, well then tough luck. Go ahead and try speaking insisting in speaking Thai in, say Africa and see how far that gets you.
eTrade SUCKS
That's a scenario at which given language (or its speakers, et al) should take affront before "exporting" itself throughout the world. After that it's no longer "our"...
One that hath name thou can not otter
This slashdot article and TFA provide absolutely no technical details, and no link to them.
Could someone please provide that? Thanks.
Hm, there was some of it ("what for / useless / why those people won't just learn our script") on the occasion of last such ICANN news (regarding TLDs in, among others, Arabic script IIRC)
Yeah, the language is about communication. And in todays world, there are lots of people for whom even Latin alphabet itself looks like, say, Georgian alphabet to you. Accidentally, they are often amongst those with most to gain, if they had less roadblocks in communication.
One that hath name thou can not otter
That's the British attitude, and indeed the very reason why you speak English!
> I hope ICANN reconsiders and returns to latin+numbers only addresses.
ICANN is in the business of hyping domain name sales and cashing in on it. Look at their TLD selloff. Applying needs a $185K non-refundable "application fee" which ICANN claim they need to cover their oveheads. Justified if they read applications while drinking Dom Pérignon from a gold slipper. The only way to convince ICANN not to do something is to convince them it won't make them money. Speculators and squatters are still out there, so no chance!
http://www.mindsandmachines.com/2010/01/icanns-credibility-in-the-balance-are-new-tlds-going-to-happen/
http://www.domainnamenews.com/up-to-the-minute/businesses-urge-icann-initiate-gtlds-delay/6121
http://domainnamewire.com/2009/02/25/icann-to-study-price-caps-on-domain-registrations/
http://www.dnforum.com/f17/icann-irt-final-report-abomination-wholly-unbalanced-thread-369416.html
TFA:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10432404.stm
All of the major programming languages I'm aware of use ASCII and have English overtones.
Perhaps it is time to accept that something useful to world communication is to pick a standard in terms of character set and so on and use that. That doesn't mean other characters can't be used locally, just that for global communication having a standard is a good thing.
I'd argue the same thing with language. I think it is a useful idea for everyone to learn a second language that everyone else speaks. Trying to get everyone to learn everyone else's language is impossible. So how about we have a second, international language.
In the real world, English largely functions this way. It is the world's most spoken second language. You can have a chat room with someone from Egypt, Japan, China, and Spain and there's a real good chance none of them speak each other's native language, but a reasonable chance they all speak English and can use that to communicate.
I don't see what the problem with saying we are going to use English and ASCII for worldwide communications is. Is it the best choice from a theoretical language standpoint? Probably not, but it is what's already in place and what people know. It is a working standard, let's stick with it and continue to push it.
Notice that everything he wrote in there was understandable to an English speaker. However many of those terms are straight from foriegn languages and have been adopted in to English. Strum und drang is German (means storm and stress), chutzpah is Hewbrew (means audacity more or less), waltz is Italian, as are most musical terms in English, and carte blanche is French (means blank check).
He's showing how English takes on new words from other languages all the time. There is no effort made to keep it "pure" whatever that would mean. Non English phrases enter the language and are accepted readily. It is a highly adaptable language.
As a recent, non-main stream example, take qq. You've probalby see it online, people saying "qq more" or "Less qq more pew pew." It means crying. Well how'd that come about? Came from Hong Kong, actually. In online games, gamers from HK liked to use QQ to indicate sadness because to them, Q's in many fonts looked like sad eyes and side-by-side is pretty normal for Asian similes. Well, English speakers took to pronouncing it, and thus it lost the capitalization and "qq" entered online lingo to mean you are crying about something. I see it all the time in games being played by Americans.
There is no ministry devoted to English purity. It is a dynamic, evolving language with no pretensions of being special or pure. It just happens to be the world's most spoken second language (partially because of British imperialism, partially because of American media dominance). Why it is doesn't matter, just that because it is such a prevalent thing, we should encourage it. English should be pushed as the International language that everyone learns. That way, you can communicate with anyone.
Too bad, the whitelist is retardedly narrow.
I imagine that Slashdot staff ruled that on an English board, Chinese characters are more useful for SJIS art and lameness filter evasion than for text.
It's only certain control characters that can cause mess like that.
Slashdot staff apparently thinks that the effort to track new control characters that get added to new versions of Unicode or implemented in operating systems' text layout engines isn't worth the additional ad revenue.
Kana developed out of man'yougana, the old "rebus" method of using Chinese characters for their sounds to spell Japanese words. Katakana were partial characters, and hiragana were cursive. Chinese has its own analogous system, called zhuyin fuhao, whose alphabet begins bo-po-mo-fo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-only_movement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law
I am an American, and I can't seem to go two weeks without hearing some blowhard blaming the country's problems on "lazy immigrants who refuse to learn our national language". If anyone points out that most other countries aren't trying to enforce a sole national language, they usually claim that America is in a unique situation; that no other country on the planet has to deal with job-seeking immigrants "the way we do", and the discussion goes downhill from there.
I'm not against America, just against the far-right American Exceptionalists whose chauvinism and fear-mongering seem to prevent any social progress or reasoned debate.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Yeah and requiring XHTML & HTML breaks the ability of people to setup web site formated in PDF (or Flash :-P ).
Standards aren't necessarily here to help every single crazy idea around.
Currently, the roman alphabet is the single common thing that you are bound to see on every single computer and other input-equiped machine connecting to the net.
If you want to be still accessible by everyone else, and not only the people having the proper font/keyboard layout/etc. combination installed, you need to support a standart input method which currently is roman alphabet. (English, BTW, isn't the only language which can be written with unaccented latin characters).
Imagine situation where a Chinese is abroad (student, tourist) and would like to read news online in chinese. The font part of the equation can be solved by embed fonts. But what about input ? If he lands in a country where only latin or cyrillic alphabet is available, he's out of luck if he wants to type the domain name. If the domain has a latin-equivalent alias, the Chinese could still type that one when no Chinese input methods are available.
Same reasoning goes for any other language using non-latin alphabet (cyrillic, japanese, arabic, herbew, etc.) roman alphabet is the only thing someone is sure to find on any foreign keyboard.
So we have to keep latin aliases for any situation where no specific input method is available. Otherwise we're going to piss of all tourists/students travelling abroad, or any person who just don't have the input method to begin with (I speak Bulgarian fluently, but never owned a cyrillic keyboard, having entirely grown up in countries using latin alphabet. I would really be pissed if suddenly I couldn't type the domains of my family members' e-mail adresses because suddenly cyrillic-only domains became the latest craze)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I have to say I don't like this one bit. It pretty much guarantees that sites with Chinese domains are essentially blocked off to the rest of the world. With Pinyin, at least a non-Chinese can visit a Chinese site without too much difficulty. Good luck trying to enter an address for a Chinese site given that you wont even have a clue how type in the address. And I'm curious to know how they will deal Japanese or Korean input. I mean, if someone in Japan uses Japanese input methods to enter the same characters, will the address work?
I'm also curious to know how they're going deal with the matter of names which are phonetically the same but use different characters. In writing it's not an issue, but if I tell someone a web address, at least in some cases, I'm going to have to point out which character I'm using.
I have to say, and this comes from years of living in Asia and having studied Chinese, that the written language is just not all that practical on a computer. Certainly it works reasonably well but it's not ideal. That's why they've got so many input methods. China's Pinyin, and Taiwan's vastly superior Zhuyin Fuhao are easy to pick up because they're phonetic. But they're also inefficient; you've still got tone to deal with and you're choosing from a list of a good 10-20 characters. There are better input methods which are much harder for people, even many Chinese to use. But these other methods let you narrow down the character you want more quickly. My wife, who's Taiwanese, finds it much quicker to use the Latin alphabet than to type in Chinese. She sees this is a big inconvenience.
Then there's the matter of Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters. It wont be so bad for someone coming from Traditional as the simplifications are fairly standard. But for someone coming from simplified they're going to have a harder time. Aesthetically China made a mess of a lot of characters in trying to simplify things, and the push was mostly political, but that's another story.
I can't help but feel that this approval was also political. ICANN wanted to show that they were culturally sensitive at the expense of global accessibility. Anyone using a computer in China can obviously the Latin alphabet. It's a necessity and will continue to be so even with this change. So there shouldn't be any Chinese unable to get online because of the inability to use Chinese addresses. This is ICANN trying to show that they're culturally sensitive and China taking advantage to get what they want for their own ends.
Don't keep using French expressions like "carte blanche". That's just so passé.
No left turn unstoned.
yeah most our writin look like chicken scratch but our alfabet's just fine, boy
The real path to male liberation
Clearly you are not familiar with my work.
As an aside, is "arse licking sperm face" supposed to be an insult? I sincerely hope that you can do better than that.
SJIS art. With Chinese characters. Never mind that Shift_JIS is Japanese ...
Never mind that over 90 percent of characters used to write Japanese come straight from Chinese. What's the proper name for the Chinese counterpart to "ASCII art"?
I assume these internationalised domain names will also potentially be mail servers, and hence probably 99% of e-mail validation code across the net will consider these domains not-valid e-mail addresses? I know any validation RegEx's I've used look for western characters :-/