International URLs Pass First Test 159
Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports on the results of a successful test of non-ASCII domain names on Internet-equivalent hardware (pdf) carried out last October. The next stage is to plug the system into the net, and if it still works, it could go live sometime next year. 'Early work on the technical feasibility of using non-English character sets suggested that the address system would cope with the introduction of international characters tests were called for to ensure this was the case ... Also needed are policy decisions by Icann on how the internationalised domain names fit in and work with the existing rules governing the running of the address books. Icann is under pressure to get the international domain names working because some nations, in particular China, are working on their own technology to support their own character sets.'"
Re:Of little use (Score:2, Interesting)
Security minded questions (Score:3, Interesting)
Some Unanswered Questions About IDNs ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Excerpt from a post of mine on DNForum regarding IDNs:
http://www.dnforum.com/showthread.php?p=732080 [dnforum.com]
I'm running into a lot of issues that many IDN folks aren't discussing - probably because they've not consider them
Various issues / threats / questions:
?? The existance of numerous diverse dialects, even totally different languages, etc in the same country
?? An IDN that contains western european characters that very close matches a non IDN
?? Trademark issues
?? language variants (more applicable to asian languages, etc) related issues
?? what happens when a language variant table changes? -how are conflicts handled?
?? what happens if a character variant (an IDN [IDL package] technically can comprise multiple character variants [code points]) is released?
?? What happens if a reserved character variant is changed to a preferred character variant? - while such a change would have little to no effect on affected IDNs (IDL packages), it could result in the appearance of some IDNs changing
?? How reliable, especially for those in languages with numerous character variants, will IDN domain resolution be?
?? How well will IDN resolution APIs be regulated
Rambling on, but there are a lot of things that one needs to be aware of with IDNs.
Balkanising the internet? (Score:4, Interesting)
If non-Roman domain names become popular, will I still be able to access them, or will they disappear behind untypeable URLs? A search engine may be able to mitigate this problem somewhat, but ATM I sometimes get search results for Japanese-language pages only because my search term is present in the URL.
1: yes, a site can still be useful in this case and no, despite the stereotype it's not just for porn.
Romanization as DNS lingua franca (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Romanization as DNS lingua franca (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Balkanising the internet? (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad example.
The Japanese are probably the *least* likely of any non-English speaking country to use non-roman url's. The fact is the standard Japanese keyboard is the same exact QWERTY keyboard we use. They can type Japanese through software, which is how they normally work when writing to each other, but there's nothing "non-intuitive" in using an English keyboard in the way that it was intended. In fact, most of them write Japanese using romanizations, then select the correct kanji through a list. So they're universally familiar with romanized url's, and like any habit, it's not going to change just because an alternative became available. Typing kanji is harder on a Japanese computer than typing a romanization.
Now, the Chinese, Russians, etc. I don't know about, so there could be better examples out there of people who would take advantage of this.
Already done (Score:3, Interesting)
Once again, committees lag behind actual problems and actual solutions.
Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to browsing
(I seem to recall that