ICANN Approves Non-Latin ccTLDs 284
Posted
by
kdawson
from the here-comes-everybody dept.
from the here-comes-everybody dept.
Several readers including alphadogg tipped the news that ICANN has approved non-Latin ccTLDs at its meeting in Seoul. "Starting in mid-November, countries and territories will be able to apply to show domain names in their native language, a major technical tweak to the Internet designed to increase language accessibility. On Friday, the Internet's addressing authority approved a Fast-Track Process for applying for an IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) and will begin accepting applications on Nov. 16. The move comes after years of technical testing and policy development... Currently, domain names can only be displayed using the Latin alphabet letters A-Z, the digits 0-9 and the hyphen, but in future countries will be able to display country-code Top Level Domains (cc TLDs) in their native language. ... 'The usability of IDNs may be limited, as not all application software is capable of working with IDNs,' ICANN said in a 59-page proposal (PDF) dated Sept. 30 that describes the [application] process." Reader dhermann adds, "Great, now even less chance I can identify NSFW links before they are blocked by my work's big brother app and my boss is notified... again."
Encoding? (Score:2, Interesting)
The encoding seems weird to me:
Any DNS gurus care to explain why they wouldn't simply use UTF8?
And the answer to that... (Score:5, Interesting)
... of course, is Punycode.
A comment [slashdot.org] before yours has www.íçáñn.örg, which, when entered into Firefox, turns into
www.xn--n-tfarxw.xn--rg-eka
. Looks like the software will still live :)
Re:Its to do with people with the wrong keyboard . (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm happy you'll do this. I won't, and the majority of the internet users won't either. It'll just further separate nations, because I won't go through the hassle of typing in a foreign character domain name - it'll just a site I won't visit.
Presumably, if a site is designed to be visited by someone who only understands English, it will use an English TLD. If it uses TLD with national characters, then most likely the content is in the language other than English as well, and you'd need to have means to input that language to fully interact with the site anyway.