Unicode URL - ☃.net | Hacker News Reader

Unicode URL - ☃.net

xn--n3h.net

24 pointsjabo13 comments

Gruber made one in 2010 (http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/starstruck). I made one to mimic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ as the url (url: ˉ⧹ˍ❨ツ❩ˍ⧸ˉ.ws -or- http://xn--zqaala8697bga007bda767m.ws/ ).

Unfortunately, it doesn't work well on all browsers/DNS servers, so it's not very practical.

Pretty sure a gaming "brand" company owns the rights to that emoticon. It was the subject of much criticism a couple months ago.

The timing of this is interesting to me. I was having a conversation with a friend who isn't a geek at all who mentioned that he met the most geeky person he'd ever come across. Someone so geeky they had a domain name which was just a black box. I'd never heard of unicode URLs before, but quickly realised what he was on about.

I raced home to find out if ♥.com was taken. I 1st tried checking it by just typing alt+3 .com in chrome's address bar, only to find out that you can't. Chrome just won't accept it. So I tried in IE and noticed that while it "resolved" out to xn--g6h.com but there was no site. Excellent I thought and quickly tried to register it only to find that I'd been beaten by about 9 years. As I checked for other available single unicode domains I found that most of them had been snapped up around 2003.

i♥you.com is for sale.

No real point to this story except that I was once again reminded that as geeky and "internet hip" as I like to think I am, I find I'm continuously 5-10 years behind the real smart people.

I think this is very bad, security wise. Take this URL for example: www.paypaᥣ.com Ofcourse it depends on the font used and the characters chosen, but you can trick people into opening a site they trust.

(for those who don't get it: the L of paypal is not an L)

This is a well-known issue, and Firefox deals with it by showing (in this example) http://xn--n3h.net/ in the address bar.

chrome is doing the same here (chrome 18/linux)

Speaking of IDNs, a few months back I had an idea for a geo service and registered http://⌖.ws — figured U+2316 Position Indicator[1] was a good fit for something related to geolocation.

I never came around to using it, so if a fellow HNer is interested in the domain, drop me a line (email in my profile).

[1] Larger image: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/font/stixgeneral-reg...

Clever but how would mom and pop type this into the address bar? I guess this is meant solely for clickable links.

I don't see much value for most of these Unicode domain names except for novelty.

However, CJK domains are a potential goldmine if you factor in:

1. Most internet ready devices in Asia have Unicode input (language-wise). For example, they can easily type 日本.com (Japan).

2. China's internet users count has surpassed 500M.

A brief lookup revealed that the most common 1-2 character domain names have already been picked up.