
Web Alphabet Set to Change - jaydub
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125664117322309953.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories
======
DanielBMarkham
I'm extremely in favor of internationalizing the web as much as possible.

But this is a mistake. Just like air traffic control, there needs to be some
minimal set of language standards web administrators should have. English had
become the de facto standard, and while not optimal (maybe), at least it was
working.

Do you know how many international characters look alike but aren't? How
difficult it's going to be to debug domain names by sight? You'd be better
going back to hex.

Maybe I'm not up to speed on the tooling, but I think this is going to be a
mess in the long run.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
See also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=903276>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=904143>

------
dspeyer
Does anyone have any details? Is ICANN declaring a single true text-encoding
for URLs? There isn't much room in them for metainfo.

------
etherealG
uh, surely all this involves is extending DNS to be unicode compliant? not
really a big deal is it?

~~~
sp332
For current latin-alphabet DNS, domains are case-insensitive. Will that still
be true? Will Google have to buy gooGle.com separately? How do you do "case-
insensitive" Japanese - don't they have 3 separate character sets for
different situations? How do you distinguish among identical-looking
characters? It's technologically simple, but there's more than technology
involved.

~~~
yannis
Domain spoofing will be one major issue you can for example have 'google' with
the two 'o' being greek omicrons, interesting times are coming:)

