The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (or ICANN) is expected to approve a new system this week that will allow for website addresses with characters other than those based on the Latin alphabet. Peter Dengate Thrush, the chairman of the ICANN described it as being "the biggest change technically to the internet since it was invented 40 years ago"Although the news is unlikely to affect the majority of Neowin readers, the internet as a whole currently has over 800 million users speaking languages with non-Latin alphabets. The proposed International Domain Name (IDN) system could potentially allow for alphabets from a wide variety of cultures, including Cyrillic, Chinese, Kanji, Korean and Greek. Considering the large number of people that would benefit from a system like this, the change seems well overdue, but the ICANN haven't rushed into this. "We're confident that it works because we've been testing it now for a couple of years", Mr Thrush said, "and so we're really ready to start rolling it out."
Based on a new system of scripts capable of converting the characters to find the right address, the IDN could be up and running as soon as mid 2010. The ICANN expect to come to a decision of the proposal this Friday.
For example:
http://www.apple.com/
http://www.ɑpple.com/
Who would ever want to google for alpha...
go to the wiki page for alpha character...
Copy the symbol...
Copy it into the URL and visit the website.
For example:
http://www.apple.com/
http://www.ɑpple.com/
thats actually a very good and scarry point
Sounds scary.
It hasn't got approval yet.
Of course the new domains that would be available would be very welcome by many countries and most would pose no problem.
Things like óòo should all be classed as the same.
The Russians, Greeks, Chinese, Japanese .......
would beg to differ, I bet they would love to enter web site addresses in their natural alphabet
Spoken like a true глупак who thinks English is the only language. Actually, it would be great; here in Bulgaria some websites would be alot easier to remember if they were in Cyrillic.
It's all been done before. Nothing new at all
Finally, accent marks and special characters in URL's
While it does open things up to more phishing attackes as Nighthawk said... I feel that other countries would actually benefit from this.
Oh, and to Jambo's comment... if you have to copy-paste the character in the URL and don't have it mapped to a key on your keyboard.... you prolly won't be affected by this ;-)
or
ﻮﻮﻮ.ﷲ.ﻛﻢ
If they do this, then it should be something other than www.
I think it goes back to the days when the www was just emerging and was "seen" as an on-par technology with other services such as Gopher and FTP. Back then YOU DID type ftp.whatever.com or gopher.whatever.com, so why not www.whatever.com?
It will die just like the http:// stopped being placed at the beginning of web addresses. The standard has become so much larger than the other internet standards, that it is just assumed.
Actually, I do that for my mail servers although my companies do operate internationally I'm still able to block languages such as Turkish or Greek since nobody uses them and we don't communicate with anyone in those countries. If we ever do then I can lift the quarantine. I know for me these language blocks take out a fair amount of spam.
A solution might be to have multiple domain names for a single IP address, with a latin alphabet domain and a native language domain.
Sounds like a bad idea all round to me.
I would guess that it won't really matter to most folks... If you need whatever language setup you already have it (or should). Trying to think of content that would/could become more restrictive, the only thing that occurs at the moment is that some posted research might become harder to get at as or if some Universities for example feel no need to continue maintaining their current domain names... a gap I'm sure Google is more than willing to fill.
But still it is not widely used because it must be vertically supported by the ISP, DNS and the browser, for example : http://www.ñuñoa.cl and http://www.nunoa.cl point to the same site.
The point of modern movement is to introduce non-latin country code top level domain. First will be Cyrillic ccTLD Table with .рф and .бг domains at the begining. There are at least 14 countries uses Cyrillic alphabet and a lot of international organizations - UN, IMF, EU, CIS etc. So new tables will need for non cc TLD domains as well. Analogs for .com, .eu, .net, .org, .gov etc. Some countries have large Cyrillic communities, like Japan, China, Baltic countries, USA etc. They will need for Cyrillic ccTLD as well. So the table will be large enough.
I also imagine individuals & smaller companies will have even more fun trying to track © abuse/violations etc... To help justify blocking western sites, saying there's no need to go there, it only makes sense that some countries would engage in wholesale clone & censor.
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