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ICANN Approves First Set of New gTLDs
hypnosec writes "ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved the first set of global Top Level Domains (gTLDs) and surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian). Approval of four non-English words can be considered as a milestone and this approval marks "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language.""
why no .microsoft? I think the company deserves to have it.
surprisingly all four are non-English words including . ("Web" in Arabic); . ("Game" in Chinese); . ("Online" in Russian); and . ("Web site" in Russian).
That's an amazing co-incidence that all those languages use a mere full stop to mean different things!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Fuck that, now I can block by TLD!
What's surprising about the fact that when ICANN started approving top-level domains that allow Unicode characters, that the first four were from languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? The only surprise to me is that two are Russian and one is Chinese, instead of the other way around.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
The fact that gTLDs are a trademark/typosquatting money grab for registrars isn't exactly news; but why exactly will non-english TLDs require 'more interpreters'?
If you don't do business in a given country or language area at all, just ignore them. If you have some limited interest in keeping the trademark-infringement scammers away, you don't need an interpreter to buy YOURNAME.whatever-incomprehnsible-foreign and have it point to your existing site. If you do do business in a given language area, presumably you already have somebody who is capable of doing the localization.
I think that gTLDs are moronic; but the difference between being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants only in English vs. being moronic and spawning random slum domains that nobody actually wants in multiple languages isn't that large.
If the world wanted to have control over the internet naming schemes, they should have spent the time, money, and effort to INVENT the internet.
'Murica!
sudo make me a sandwich
... "the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language."
I happen to be able to type in website addresses for generic Top-Level Domains in my native language and I do so every day, you insensitive clod!
Point and tap on your tablet dude.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Every domain under NSA surveillance should be required by law to register under the .nsa domain.
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Please ICANN, please. You are ruining what a TLD was supposed to be.
Worse, these are top-level TLDs, stop polluting the global space with shitty word-grab TLDs.
If people want TLDs for their crap in their country, force them to use the country identifiers that were all made standard 50 gigayears ago.
http://ru.crappy-word-grab-TLDs.whatever-crap-site.subdomains/crap-directories-with-nothing-in-them-because-you-paid-a-fortune-for-a-site-nobody-will-know-exists/thanks-obama.html
Oh, also, flip the damn DNS already. Newsgroup hierarchy is considerably better than DNS will ever be. At least flip it around so it can be even closer but still nowhere near as good.
Can we just work on a full replacement of the web that runs alongside it already? It is not like any of the casual morons that use computers every day will even notice the difference, those idiots google Facebook and click the first result and they are happy. So the ones smart enough to know the difference between a program and a website will know how the new system works easily.
Also make sure ICANN has nothing to do with it because greedy and awful.
the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language.
And the first time many people won't be able to access and type in a website address just because it's written in a language their OS's input methods can't reasonably handle.
(yeah, yeah, I know all those companies will get a .com next to their localized gTLD name that everybody will use instead; this is just a moneygrab after all).
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.
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So, if unicode characters are now a legitimate part of website names, I'd like to register a new domain:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm
Imagine all the fun I could have with it: microsoft.pile-of-poo, oracle.pile-of-poo, mostgovernmentrepresentatives.pile-of-poo and so on. It would make blogging so much more satisfying. Who wants to be a dot-com anymore? So 90s. Be poop instead!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
1. Reserve the .isanasshole TLD
2. Hollywood actors pay huge amounts so nobody can register "myname.isanasshole"
3. Profits!
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"the first time that people will be able to access and type in a website address for generic Top-Level Domains in their native language."
My native language is english, I've been able to do this for a long time.
As a dumb American, how am I going to type these?
You jest, but there's a darker side to being "full international".
I have a keyboard setup that allows me to easily enter virtually any character used in any latin-based alphabet, although the Slashdot editor would promptly sit on them (Hey, I want my "thorn" back!).
Without a whole lot of trouble, I can bump the tally up to include Arabic/Persian, and I have ways to branch out from there. However, the more extensive the character set is, the more problems come with it. Arabic is right-to-left, not left-to-right. It also has a whole raft of ligatures and looks really ugly if you don't use them. Chinese/Japanese "character sets" contain thousands of elements.
Putting together routing and filtering rules for a variety of systems while supporting all those possibilities is a nightmare, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
The "murican" character set may be parochialistic, but it's about as simple as Latin goes. No funny dots or accent marks, no hooks at the bottoms of letters. No alternate codings that can confuse both memorization and collating sequences.
I strongly support the ability to render content to the full extend that localization allows. But I'd really be a lot happier keeping the basic routing and identifying components limited to something manageable.
seriously, why limit them at all? surely it'd make tons of money and likely not add to much more effort to maintain.
...
I think you should give ASCII a bit more credit; ~ ` ' ^ " and , were/are all supposed to be used as accent marks in the original version by backspacing over the letter and adding the necessary punctuation mark.
It's weird that you're complaining about the travails of inputting ligatures—you do know that all major platforms have IMEs that do the work for you, right? It's generally built into their regional input layout. This is what makes inputing CJK languages feasible; you run a phonetic search against the database of characters and it pulls up the ones that match. In Windows, at least, you can switch between different input languages and keyboard layouts with a mere hotkey.
And if for some reason that's not enough, one of the several Chinese IMEs is actually just a Unicode lookup; you type in the hexadecimal code of the character you want and it slaps it in your document. Requires an absurd amount of memorization to use effectively for anything, but I think in any proper Emacsian quest for completionism that's somewhat acceptable.
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That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?
This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).
Anyone sending emails from these new TLD's get a nasty surprise due to years and years of email regexes bouncing their email as coming from a bad address.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I feel fine.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
No you ". (“Web site” in Russian)"
Corporations are people, remember? And the important ones that buy and sell legislatures like bars of soap are all multinational corporations. They don't have countries.
That's rather Amero-centric of you. Would you go to an Arabic language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Arabic characters. Would you go to a Japanese language website? If so, you probably have a way to type Japanese characters. These characters have been allowed in certain parts of the URL for a long time, but never the TLD. What, largely, has changed?
This is a step towards more globalization, which is a good thing for everyone except the people who are on top but unable to take full advantage of being on top (the American middle and lower classes).
No, actually, it's not Amero-centric. It's historo-centric. Just like lawyers are hung up on Latin. What concerns me isn't the language - since to computers all languages are equally gibberish, it's the complexity of the support mechanism. ASCII/EBCDIC were the character sets used to set up the Internet, and support for them (ASCII, at least) is pretty well universal.
Once you're AT a website, I would certainly hope that their data entry facilities are supporting their target audiences, whatever they are in whatever languages/character sets make the users happy. But getting there shouldn't be balkanized. What we have now is a lowest common denominator. What we risk achieving is a World-Wide Web that's so nationalistic that no one will make the effort required to leave home.
You're confusing data entry with uniform resource identifiers. Ligatures exist in English as well, but we don't use them in domain names. Nor do we use control characters (backspace, for example, which only worked on devices that could overprint).
What you do within a website is between you and the site provider. I'm only concerned with the general navigation of the Internet.
That's fair, although I think most of the issues that can be raised which are specific to URIs are either (a) answered by data solutions (databases have no trouble sorting Unicode text) or (b) analogous to existing problems (squatting domains by misusing ligatures is really no different from squatting on typos.) I guess having to write a regex for every gTLD ever would be a pain, but when IDN was first introduced there was an RFC (3490) that specifically set out a turnkey algorithm for ASCIIfying the whole mess. Instead of spooky invisible control codes you only need to deal with cumbersome strings clogged with hyphens.
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Nice article summary. Still don't support that 1998 technology called "UTF-8," do ya, Slashdot?
Liberty in your lifetime
No you ". (“Web site” in Russian)"
In Soviet Russia ". (“Web site” in Russian)" you!
As we cannot post unicode versions, here are the punycode versions:
And DNS will continue to use Punycode in the foreseeable future. DNS is all that matters here as what is a "domain name" (read: hostname) other than a mapping of name to number?
There is an application for .WTF (as well as .FOO and .DOT, etc etc)
Ha! A little short-sighted.
We don't have to worry, but amazon, slashdot and other big guys must decide whether they can just reject future (whateverUNICODEtld) used as email addresses for registration at their sites. Imagine google.(whateverUNICODEtld)!
Oh, the proliferation of pure-shakedown TLDs is, undoubtedly, a clusterfuck in the making, that much I fully agree with. I was just unimpressed by the original poster's 'zOMG foreign!!!' concerns. With the exception of legacy systems that still can't handle unicode, being shaken down for bullshit TLDs that are latin-character nonsense isn't much different than being shaken down for bullshit TLDs that are unicode nonsense(except for wacky glyph similarity-based impersonations, of course, those will be fun!)
... as we increasingly see the nationalistic silos being re-erected. Don't go '.com', go '.ca' to show your patriotism to Canada. Only a matter of time before we get '.pq' for Province of Quebec (with only websites in French allowed and the word 'pasta' forbidden).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.