
The surprisingly complex reason you never see emoji URLs - wamatt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/23/the-surprisingly-complex-reason-you-never-see-emoji-urls/
======
Scaevolus
Punycode (the way Unicode maps to DNS names) is pretty clever. Characters for
a given language are close together, so Punycode optimizes for encoding
characters close together.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode)

Here's an example from the RFC:
[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492#section-7.1](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3492#section-7.1)

    
    
        Unicode:      他们为什么不说中文 
        DNS:          xn--ihqwcrb4cv8a8dqg056pqjye
        utf8 base64:  5LuW5Lus5Li65LuA5LmI5LiN6K+05Lit5paH
    

Let's see if HN will link these:

[http://.ws](http://.ws) -> [http://xn--ls8h.ws/](http://xn--ls8h.ws/)

edit: Nope, it strips (!) emoji from comments.

~~~
jackweirdy
️

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martin-adams
I registered a smiley + camera .ws for my vlog (.ws -> [http://xn--
vu8hnq.ws](http://xn--vu8hnq.ws))

It's a fun thing, but not very practical. Not even I can remember which
variation of smiley I used, plus different devices render them differently so
it can be hard to remember or recognise.

I would only use it as a gimmick right now, where I can use short URLs in say
tweets.

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wccrawford
I thought it was rather simple: Because as a human, I have no idea how to
enter this URL in the browser.

~~~
webrender
You can bring up the emoji picker in most input fields with ctrl-cmd-space on
osx, or by using the onscreen keyboard in windows.

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zde
> How do you keep the domain system clear and intuitive for users?

We have non-latin TLDs now, so I don't buy this.

