As I'm browsing around domain auctions, I found a lot of domains for sale with diacritics; eg:
āds.com
Whoa. How does that work? How does one go to āds.com and the browser not go to ads.com?
Dimitri
11:32 pm on Jul 23, 2022 (gmt 0)
Each TLD has its range of allowed characters. So if a character, like "ā" is allowed, web browsers will pass them straight to the DNS server, and web server. If a character is not part of the acceptable range, the browser will escape it with % ... but web browsers will never change the value of a character.
robzilla
8:51 am on Jul 24, 2022 (gmt 0)
Punycode is what's used to convert these unicode character domains to an ASCII equivalent. The āds.com domain translates to xn--ds-oia.com, so that's what your browser would connect to (and what you'd be buying in the auction).
