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Comment by Markoff | Hacker News Reader

xn-- domains are fallback Unicode compatibility domains for systems that don't support it. It's mainly seen in Asia. So it's not the intended representation of the domain name, that's ubähnchen.vercel.app

I think ubähnchen means little U-bahn.

It's interesting to see Germans are still very strict with their letter accents even in domain names. I'm from the Netherlands myself and because we mainly use US keyboards (there is a NL type but nobody uses it), accents are a PITA to type so people started leaving them out. These days they're almost extinct, as is the ligature for "ij". We're pretty pragmatic like that. Personally I wouldn't even care if we phase Dutch out for English, it's just much more useful on a global scale. But that's probably a step too far for most.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

it's good critical comment if you can read, clearly saying the domain name is not memorable and readable, even the author understood it in his response and blames HN website for using different link than he submitted

> A good critical comment teaches us something.

It was not the case here. It was an ironic dissmissal of something that’s totally secondary to OP’s work. This is why you’ve been downvoted, not because you "stated facts".

The link I posted was https://ubahnchen.vercel.app but, because there is a redirection, HackerNews changed it automatically.

You can also memorize ubaehnchen.vercel.app

fair enough, but then the HN is the problem and I have no way knowing you posted correct (memorable) link

Sorry you faced downvotes. No offense taken.

I think the lesson here would be using only ordinary characters in domain names (then what HN does would not matter), if you (and I mean anyone, not you in particular) advertise domain with special characters people will be confused because some companies advertise domain with special characters while you should actually read it with normal characters and not literally plus there is quite a stigma that these special characters are used for malicious purposes to pretend they are different sites. Dunno what's situation in Germany but here in Czechia where we also widely use special Latin characters in language, but they are pretty much non existent from domain names, though sometimes you can see them and they mean you should strip the domain name in your head and type it without special characters.

That’s punycode encoding, defined in RFC3492(2003) but not getting much traction since.

Depends on how much you interact with non-ASCII domains. I see it relatively often.

ubähnchen.vercel.app seems quite memorable

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