ICANN set to allow non-Latin characters in domain names, half the world rejoices
By Vlad Savov 
posted October 29th 2009 6:49AM
posted October 29th 2009 6:49AM
[Via Switched]
posted October 29th 2009 6:49AM
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pretty big deal
J'adore Astérix et Obélix!
AFAIK domain names with Chinese characters have been available for a couple of years now (ie you can type 谷歌.cn to get to Google China since 2006), not sure if that's considered testing phase and this is the formal announcement. This would be a pretty big deal if it means non-Latin characters for Top Level Domains.
Yes it is - I can't tell you how much I've wanted to visit vodka.com using cyrillic letters :D
Yay, more flailing by ICANN'T.
i am russian speaker myself and curious how it would work.
would www.гугл.com lead to the same site as google.com?
And how would speakers of that language who do not have native keyboard be able to access that website?
For example someone who's Greek but lives in US and has no greek keyboard...how would he access the website?
Are they inventing the 5th wheel here? Was it not working properly before? It's not like it added an easier way to access specific websites.
You summed up my response exactly.
what are you guys talking about, you can swap your keyboard layouts in seconds to any numbers of downloadable languages and even setup hot keys to quickly switch back and forth.
I assume it will work both ways. Maybe Latin domain will be there and other character domains will be optional..
konshuss: On every PC you're on? Even with low privileges, like on a public PC (internet cafe..)?
My guess is over time it will become easier, but I can definitely see some possible complications...
If it isn't broken, don't fix it. I think the internet is good without the special characters. It is simpler, easier, and way more accessible. Imagine now that smartphones are on the raise. Imagine how hard would it be for someone on a smartphone or a cellphone to get access to those sites. Instead of opening the web, we would really be closing it down to certain segments. If you are russian, and come to vacation to the US, good luck finding an easy way to access the website.
Would this also mean Chinese characters would be able to be part of a domain?
I am not being racist, ethnocentric, or anything like that, but English does have the simplest, fastest alphabet. .
P.S: I, myself, personally a Francophone (french-speaker) have the point of view of many people in France and Franco-regions. Characters are darn too hard to enter and they make communication harder. You should see how French kids text - the eldery hates it. There is a combination of numbers and letters to avoid the use of those characters. Now imagine if before, a simple switching of letters will take you to another website, now imagine having to type www.tâchesenfrançaispourélèves.com
that is a nightmare... We need to protect the internet from this fragmentation. I am foreign-born myself, so this doesn't comes from a KKK person... this comes from a person who wants to see a united world where everyone can easily communicate with each other.
@tikiteko: Wait what makes the Latin alphabet simpler or faster than the Greek, Russian, Korean, etc. alphabet? And how do we measure simplicity and speed, and why do they matter? In at least one way, IP addresses are simpler (just ten possible characters!) and faster (shorter than a most domain names!). (Well, okay, 16 and they're longer now, but that's not really the point.) But they're crap because they're hard to remember and make no sense (to the majority of the population). I can see similar points made by people unfamiliar with the Latin alphabet, though I'm just conjecturing there.
well I don't know about russian or greek, but for arabic we have a service (at www.yamli.com) that automatically transliterates from english letters to arabic.
For example if I wrote alarabiya (or al3rabiya for that matter :P), it'll convert it to العربية for me.. I thought it was kind of cool :P
We should a switch from English to Klingon.
Tell Microsoft to implement a Compose Key for Windows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key). Then all will be well :)
Oh, and if you aren't on Windows, both MacOS and Linux (with XOrg) support the Compose key. In Linux you need to turn it on. For me, I have it set to right Alt, so pressing Alt + e + ' gives me é.
Windows already has their IME system which allows you to easily switch between character sets and character input methods. Users who use a non-Latin character set (Chinese, Japanese, Russian...) already have this installed. You can install it as well as it's a standard part of Windows' OS since Win98 or so.
So, entering the strings won't be the hard part. The hard part is all the underlying stuff that now has to be able to understand 8 bit, multi-byte characters. And what if you know the reading of a website, but not how it's written? For instance, how is "Toyota" written in Japanese? How you write it could result in a different website.
Moreover is the larger problem that Latin letters ("A") are repeated in all character sets for backwards compatibility purposes, but they do not all have the same byte value. Then there's other characters that look similar, but are not the same as more familiar letters. Which is the real letter A? Α? A? Ａ? Answer? The middle one. The left one is from the Greek character set, and the right one is from the Japanese character set. However, used in a domain name, would you be able to distinguish which one is the legitimate address?
Russian domain names were available for few years already as well as Chinese, Japanese etc. Sad thing some tech savvy russian readers don't even know that. Учи матчасть, мужик. Стыдно должно быть. :) ICANN just did not register international domains before, now it made it possible. Local registrators were able to register non-latin domain names long time ago.
Well, some domains don't have to deal with English at all, especially if they are local based (Ex. in Russia) so why would they need any other language, than their native? ... I personally think that this was created just to make money in the future for buying a reserved domains. I am pretty sure that the next day this service will be available for sale, a new monopolist will emerge and buy most of the reasonable domain names...
"Greek but lives in US and has no greek keyboard...how would he access the website?"
Soft Keyboards. Windows PCs, Linux boxes and Macs already come with these. So does all the new smart phones (iPhone or the ones running on Android, Web OS or Win Mobile). Which makes sense considering that you would be visiting google.com more than say www.гугл.com
As for the domain name language input problem, basically it translate non latin words in to "something" in latine therefore it's still latin-ish.
I don't see what's wrong with typing www.tâchesenfrançaispourélèves.com (especially considering that mainly francophones would do that). By the way, every time we type less and less in the address bar, we have autofill, links, bookmarks, etc.
FYI Cantonese usually refers to the spoken dialect (language, arguably). It is still written using traditional Chinese characters (or simplified Chinese characters, I suppose, it's possible). It's not formal to write in Cantonese terms - it's considered slang. Formal writing is pretty much the same as the Mandarin, but it's popular to write spoken Cantonese these days.
They are ideograms, not hieroglyphics. And yes, Cantonese can be written, but no one outside Canton and HK will know how to access them...
"half the world rejoices, and
the other half is perplexed at how the characters are inputted"
"Half the world hates what half the world does everyday..."
I`LL stick to the old IP adressing
Enjoy memorizing addresses such as 2001:0db8:0000:0000:0000:0000:1428:57ab
Aren't IP addresses like 193.245.14.5???
Your speaking of mac addresses my friend.
@copeys: IPV6, http://www.amirite.net ?
lol, I am wrong. Apologies
All good points. This is completely unnecessary.
Exactly, that's why there was an argument to remain with the current system of latin only characters; to avoid fragmenting the internet community.
Basically having a website address in in non-latin characters ensures that you will have no international exposure. So I think overtime websites in those countries will gravitate to latin address anyway because it simply is the international standard, and one of the biggest advantages of the internet is being able to reach a global community.
I don't think some Chinese websites care if you (a non-Chinese) visit them or not.
Those that do care will use what's appropriate.
Exactly what I think. I think this is just an attempt to finance ICANN through the global community. They will see some frenzy of people rushing to register keyword in their language, and make a fortune out of it.
I think the simpler the internet is, the better, do an ICANN car wash or something if you need to raise funds, but on my opinion this is just cultural fragmentation. I can only imagine the new phishing coming out of this...
Well URLs are pretty cheap so if a company wants to reach multiple countries they can pretty easily register all those URLs. It's not like the extra 5 bucks a year is gonna ruin their bottom line.
Once again another "let's pat ourselves on the back because we are so open minded and look at the social progress we are making." move. Not to be political, but it is ICANN so obviously there are some political factors in play here.
I guess things like practicality, infrastructure ect don't matter when you live in a mental utopia where you imagine the entire world consists of nothing but helpless people that need you to make the world "just" for them in the most insignificant ways.
When in reality, the vast majority of people in the world, would much rather you know... we ship them some food, help build some schools, or stop their genocide.... but hey... non-latin domain name characters... I'm sure those 100,000s starving children in Asia will pee blood a little less painfully tonight knowing their cultural interpretation of language is endorsed by ICANN.
In reality, all this is going to do, is open up a whole world full of new ways for Grandma to get her celeron equipped E-machines desktop even more infected with all sorts of new URLs to redirect to Barnyardpr0n.com
Вася! Наливай!!
ха-ха-ха!
Наздраве батеее!!!
Не, мне эта идея не нравится..
И пить вредно товарищи.
der tuk r joebs. DURKA DURKA!
Да уж... по проще не смогли ни чего придумать...
Ку-ку рука.
Путин, Путин.
КАКАШКА, ХУЙ, ПИЗДА, БЗДА и т.д.
ПИДАРЫ ВЫ ВСЕ очкастые.
"Hey! 259316! We don't take kindly to your types in here!"----- :)
A whole new market for domain squatters and similar fiends who work off of typo's in URL's. Just what everyone has been waiting for.
It's not domain squatters, it's scammers who substitute non-latin characters into latin words that look like the lating ones... kinda like paypal.com becomes paץpal.com
Craaaaaaaaaaaap.