What is the status of International Domain Names?

Is there any future for IDN's?

[Hagstrom]

This spring I bought a domain with non ASCII-7 letters (my own name actually).
Does anybody know the status of IDN's. Will they ever work outside Internet Explorer?

[toolman]

Doesnt look to be a priority for anyone. [verisign-grs.com...]

[bill]

The closing of Real Names really killed the Asian domain names market according to some. I personally wasn't too thrilled about relying on a plug-in that only worked on IE as the basis for domain name technology.

We had a thread about this [webmasterworld.com] over in the Asia and Pacific forum.

[Hagstrom]

I saw that thread, but it was rather old and dealt mainly with problems with simplied Chinese.
Are you saying that IDNs will never work outside IE? Isn't there a chance that one day it will be built into all the new browsers?

[Lisa]

I think plugins and patches will be the future of IDN for a long time to come. The only hope I see is the RFC. The experts that I have talked to say that the DNS system is not build to do this. However this is a encode/decode standard that just made it past the IETF seems like it has the highest potential. Here is a good article to read on the subject.

[heise.de...]

[bill]

I saw that thread, but it was rather old and dealt mainly with problems with simplied Chinese.

Actually we were discussing anything non-ASCII, but our focus was on Japanese and Chinese. A lot of information was put out by JPNIC and CNNIC about their plans to use IDNs...we were just following the news from there.

Are you saying that IDNs will never work outside IE?

Actually, JPNIC stopped sales of IDNs after RealNames was dropped by Microsoft, so essentially that killed the native-Japanese domain name plans for the immediate future. The Chinese had a RealNames clone in place before Microsoft dumped RealNames itself, but I haven't seen much progress on that front. I think a lot of people are now saying wait for the IETF and ICANN to set standards for IDNs. When that'll happen is anyone's guess. Browser plug-ins seem to have been the most frequently implemented method of dealing with IDNs to date. I do recall reading that there was a way of using a server plug-in to do this work as well.

[Hagstrom]

Actually we were discussing anything non-ASCII

Well, my name is in ASCII. The only problem is that one of the letters is in eight-bit ASCII. :)

Thanks for your replies (and thanks to the other posters too). I'll just hope that I'll retain the right to my domain even if they change the technical implementation.