Web chief warns of domain name chaos

Introducing non-English letters to addresses may 'break the whole Internet'

[fabricator]

Introducing non-English characters to website addresses could 'break the whole Internet', an expert has warned.

[smh.com.au...]

"At present there are 37 possible characters that can be used in domain names, but if non-English letters are allowed, this number would rise to 50,000 or more, said Twomey."

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Moderator's Note: Folks, let's keep the dialogue far removed from "us versus them" or "English versus any other language or culture". The object of this thread is to raise awareness of the issues that attach to the domain name system status quo and to dialogue about the benefits or problems associated with changing the status quo.

Please, do not interject any version of "us versus them" into thread. WebmasterWorld is NOT an us versus them place. WebmasterWorld is a how do we get things to work for everyone in the world wide webmaster world". (Someday we'll even have language translation software that will make it a bit easier to post in 120+ languages. ;0) )

Thank you. Webwork, Domain Forum Moderator

[edited by: Webwork at 4:43 am (utc) on Nov. 27, 2006]

[Quadrille]

PS I hear a rumour that what we call 'French letters', the French call 'English letters' - but it may be idle gossip. :)

[Leosghost]

nope it's true ..:)..non c'est vrai.

well ..actually it would translate as "english car hoods" which yet again shows why "autotrans" wont work ;-)

[edited by: Leosghost at 4:59 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2006]

[tntpower]

Introducing non-English letters is really a good idea, as most people in the world do not speak English.

microsoft.com is too hard for many people in the world to remember when they want to visit MS's website. Microsoft-in-their-language.com will be much easier;Microsoft-in-their-language.com-in-their-language will be even better. However, I think the final solution is to type company name (in their language) in browser's address bar directly to go to company's website (provided the company has purchased this name from brower vendors; many companines work in this area) or go to a search page.

[swa66]

All that is needed to solve this is to allow the users of a client (e.g. a web browser, hostname resolution in the OS, ...) to determine what charsets they are willing to see and show all the others only in their technical xn--* form.

That way those really interested in one of the alternative charsets can see their way of writing and those of us who're not interested to see an "ebay" showing up with an 'a' in cyrilic can avoid to see them and potentially get misguided.

So, IMHO the key is to default disable IDN in browsers and allow users to enable it in just those charsets their language(s) need.

The other aspect is protecting one's trademarked names with all these alternative ones out there gets a lot harder to do, so perhaps all the domainnames to look like an already registered domainname should be considered unregistrable (but that's not the habit of ICANN or any of the registries/registrars.

[pixeltierra]

In the future, all email client software will block clicking of links

Like all stop signs make people stop? It's too easy to build a client that allows links.

I still think the solution is not to be able to mix char sets in domains.