A year of non-Latin script domain names | Hacker News Reader

A year of non-Latin script domain names

thenextweb.com

12 pointscodelion16 comments

Am I the only one that feels this move to non-Latin domain names is a bad idea? People spend tons of effort to create a uniform interface for seemingly disparate systems. We started out fine, but now we're moving towards separating our system.

We've had a uniform language that the world can adopt for communication across the web, but now we're going to create seemingly impossible to reach sites because we don't have a special character keyboard. Why anyone would think this is a great idea to "accommodating" other languages in this manner is beyond me. Can someone shed some light? Am I missing something?

> People spend tons of effort to create a uniform interface > for seemingly disparate systems.

The world is bigger than US and ASCII is not enough for all.

> Why anyone would think this is a great idea to > "accommodating" other languages in this manner is beyond me.

Why? To have domain name in other languages. Or do you assume the web is English-only?

If my favorite basketball club is "Žalgiris" why should it be zalgiris.lt instead of žalgiris.lt? And you don't know how to type in some specific URL chances are that you won't be interested in site's content anyway.

Also removing those 'strange' dots and dashes from a word can in many languages leave you with a new valid word, with a completely different meaning.

For reference a couple of years ago some county or similar here in Sweden named Hörå had their website as www.hora.se, but that actually means whore here. Now we can have our 'strange' dots though which is a good thing.

« Why anyone would think this is a great idea to "accommodating" other languages in this manner is beyond me. »

Why anyone would think that forcing a large part of the world to use a foreign alphabet is a good idea is beyond me.

Do you realize that the latin alphabet is actually _hard_ to read/write for a lot of people out there ? Do you realize that it is as annoying for them to write in latin that it is for you to write in, say, cyrillic ?

Yes, you are definitely missing something. Flip the script and try to think about it in reverse.

How would you like it if you currently had to use Chinese kanji ideographs to enter domain names? There would be no 'hackernews.com'. Instead, you would have to input something like '黒客新聞.網' If you wanted to have a blog with your name, you'd need to translate your name into kanji characters and register that--no lowglow.com or anything like that.

Even if you learned some kanji so you could browse to this site, and use the kanji-based Internet (and we all would learn us some kanji, if somehow that was the only way the Internet could be used) wouldn't you find that annoying?

But that is exactly the kind of thing that the hundreds of millions of users whose native writing systems don't map to roman letters have had to put up with.

I write in a few languages, including Japanese. So I remember the old days 15-20 years ago when you had to install a 'language kit' just to open a text file in certain non-English languages. Thankfully, all major modern operating systems have evolved beyond that.

It is good and appropriate for Internet domain names to also evolve beyond the primitive limitations of yesteryear that no longer have any technical reason to exist.

(Also, as an aside, you do not need a special keyboard to type those characters, modern operating systems have input method software that lets you compose text in virtually any language regardless of what type of keyboard you have.)

I think the only thing you have to look out for is a "paypål" domain pointing to a phishing scheme... There are technical ways to handle this, but people have fallen for less.

I agree though, that in the name of progress, this is a good thing and makes the Internet more accessible to all.

Also, realistically, what URI's do you actually type in yourself besides Google?

It's been a year already, and still I don't think I've ever visited a non-Latin-script URL. You would think the web would be the end of parochialism.

What would happen to top level domain names like .com, .net etc ? Even they use non-latin characters before .com, .net etc "com", "net" is still Latin.

I don't think they would let . be part of beginning or ending of the domain name.

. is by itself a Latin character.

You can have http://ai/ so I guess you can have anything.

And I thought x.org was unusually short...

Not exactly. There are already IDN TLDs in existence.

More specifically, the "." is still a separator. Any component of the domain name can independently have xn-- and it will be interpreted as Punycode. Today you could register ujjvala.السعودية and it would be completely valid.

Where do you live? Do you use non-latin characters every day? Do you read langauges that use non-latin characters?

As another anecdotal data point, I visit non-Latin URLs almost every day working in Tokyo. For example,

http://www.amazon.co.jp/自転車-カテゴリー別/b/ref=sa_menu_bic9?node=1...

Although I can't really figure out why they bother localizing that one component of their URL, when they have all that gibberish-in-any-language crap at the end.

That is just an internationalized resource identifier (IRI), which is a different thing--and more widely supported--than an internationalized domain name (IDN). I too seldom use those in practice.

Because the part of the URL after the actual host/domain doesn't involve the DNS system, progress was more quickly made there.

More info: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/

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