Character domains and email addresses.

[chrix]

bump.

What's the state of affairs in 2010?

[renzhe]

Well, the URLs with Unicode characters are rather commonplace, see any Chinese wikipedia site for an example.

As for the actual domain names, I'd say this is still very rare. I did notice one domain: http://好動網.tw/ but it's the exception rather than a rule.

Unicode domains are mostly used for phishing, unfortunately.

[chrix]

Yeah, I've noticed the Wikipedia stuff, too. But with many browsers you don't get the Unicode characters in the URL, you often get the % Hex code thing.

And I tried the URL, that's quite cool, but my browser (Chrome) doesn't display it, it's all numbers, in this case http://xn--hhrt8ms97a.tw/ (I'm not sure if this is an alternate URL as it doesn't look like Hex code).

I was just checking if I hadn't missed anything big. The way I see it they made a big hype about it 6,7 years ago, and then it kinda fizzled...

[renzhe]

It will depend on the browser. I get full Unicode throughout.

[Hofmann]

Those who use Chinese characters might buy many domain names, e.g. 誰鬼網站.com and 谁鬼网站.com.

[imron]

it's all numbers, in this case http://xn--hhrt8ms97a.tw/

That's called punycode. Basically, it's unicode encoded into 7bit ascii so that it works within the existing framework for domain names. Many modern browsers will always display the punycode representation of an international address in the address bar, because in Unicode there are many characters that look similar to standard characters, making it easy for malicious sites to deceive users.

[roddy]

More news here. Five new top-level domains, 中国 and 台湾 in both simplified and traditional versions (will those be sold separately?) and 香港。

[Matty]

The problem currently with IDNs (International Domain Names) is the domain name system is not properly designed for UTF-8 encoding.

For example if you were to type the web address: http://www.汉语水平考试.com it would be translated to: http://www.xn--gwt091a1by53ikqn9d.com

This is not very appealing for most people and one of the main reasons I'm concluding that they haven't been widely adopted.

I was however considering doing a paper on this for my PHD, however that's another story.

The point is the browser doesn't keep the International characters at the top and they're not stored in international characters at the end destination.