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."
You can link but it will need to be to the punycode versions for the domain portion, I suspect. Just wait for international email addresses - it's viagra ads in all the languages of the world.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
More registrations = more money!
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...
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
Slashdot did allow Unicode. Then things like like this happened. Blame the comment trolls for forcing Slashdot to use a whitelist of characters allowed.
As for domain names, from what I see, they start with a standard prefix (I think it's "xn--") followed by the Unicode codepoints. Just so they're compatible across all systems. Browsers can choose to display the codepoints, or, I'm seeing an option to not do that, so you can tell Paypal.com from xn--blahblabblah.xn--blah.
You don't get it: gTLDs and ccTLDs are being translated (aliased) as well. When this is done, for, say, the Japanese user, there will be no need for any ASCII, whatsoever. As for mapping to ASCII, all IDNs are mapped to punycode, which is ASCII, but it will be invisible. And mixed scripts aren't allowed, so phishing fears are overblown; it won't be any worse than it is today. IDNs should have been a part of the original DN structure, but better late than never. It's simply idiotic to have an entire website in Japanese, except for the DN.
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.