

'Historic' day as first non-latin web addresses go live - yanw
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10100108.stm

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thechangelog
Spare a thought for maintainers of URL parsers and validators today. [a-z0-9-]
just isn't going to cut it anymore.

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Bjoern
While I appreciate change and improvements, I just wonder if this is really a
good idea. Websites are language specific but URLs were forced to a limited
character set. This was making it at least easy for everybody to type it. No
matter if the website is chinese, japanese, arabic, etc. (Sort of least common
denominator)

Am I the only one who thinks this?

EDIT: Spelling

~~~
inerte
Well, if the standard url naming was chinese characters (ie: what everybody is
typing), do you think it would be easy for you? I think you would like to
type/access urls in your own language.

~~~
Bjoern
Interesting thought. I suppose if computers were originating from China that
would probably be the case. I doubt though that if they wanted to sell it to
some other countries, the buyers, e.g. US, Europe consumers etc. would accept
that increased complexity.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca>

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jluxenberg
_"All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written
fully right-to-left,"_

The URL itself will still read left-to-right, so this doesn't seem like a big
win.

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simonw
And someone's already got <http://www.xn--b1avn2f.com/> \- a.k.a. HSBC.com :/

~~~
studer
Registered in December last year, it seems.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the related searches are "Virus
Software", "Virus", "Virus Trojan", etc. Not sure what "Ford" is doing in that
list, though.

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kadavy
Okay, so where can I buy a bunch of domains?

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dkarl
Any Persian examples? I'd like to surprise a friend. Perhaps HNers can post an
example for each script or language.

~~~
kijeda
The only such Persian URL is the URL ICANN deployed a number of years as part
of its testing of IDNs.

<http://مثال.آزمایشی>

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motvbi
How does one regiter these domain names? Are there any registrar who currently
support this?

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andybak
Any live examples yet?

~~~
guelo
<http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر>

~~~
locopati
Is it the browser or HN that's turning that URL into <http://xn----
rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/> ?

~~~
sorbits
The xn--… stuff is the real URL as it exists in the DNS.

Conversion to/from the user’s script is supposed to be done by the browser.

This has existed for quite a while, the new thing is that previously the TLD
(i.e. country code) still had to be the old ASCII ISO code. Now even the TLD
can be encoded, so that it will display in the country’s native script. So far
there are 3 non-ASCII TLDs registered (that is, in the DNS they are still
ASCII using puny coding).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puny_code>

------
MWinther
"biggest change" to the net "since it was invented 40 years ago"? Methinks
not. Although on the more fundamental DNS level I can imagine they have a
point.

