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Comment by tsavola | Hacker News Reader

Do you mean Punycode, or this joke?

Punycode is the joke

Limiting dns names to 26 latin characters and the 10 arabic digits is the joke. From the top of my head I can't come up with a single language other than English that doesn't use additional letters (or at least additional modifiers on some letters). Punycode is the most sane solution to an insane situation.

Well, latin works, but it's not that popular outside of Vatican nowadays :)

Swahili, Hawaiian, Italian, that's just off the top of my head, there are many others.

Hawaiian uses ' as a proper letter, granted.

Doesn't Italian use accented vowels in some cases?

Ah, yes of course it does. Silly me.

None of this detracts from the greater point, being that we need a way for all writing systems to somehow squeeze down into the subset of ASCII supported by legacy protocols.

Even english has some borrowed expressions like "à la" that can are more correctly written with non-ascii characters, so not even english is really safe, if you want to be a bit fancy about it.

DNS should have been UTF-8 from the beginning; that would have been a good solution. As things stand, slapping punycode on it is a terrible solution to a dumb problem.

But then again, when you invent something, you decide how it works, and the world could just re-invent a more international version of DNS but chose not to.

Also, ASCII is still probably the best charset to use, if you have to choose one; it can represent most possible sounds in some way and symbols represent single sounds (as opposed to, for example, chinese characters). It's very widely used (as opposed to, for example, the greek alphabet).

So yes, limiting DNS names to 26 latin characters and 10 arabic digits was probably the best option at the time.

DNS is the joke, punycode is one of the punchlines. ;-)

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