URL's in foreign languages

When will foriegn language URL's exist?

[garrybetting]

When will foriegn language URL's exist?
I have heard Russian and Chinese URL's may exist soon.
How come they haven't till now?
Is the web only able to use English letters?
How does this change all of a sudden?
And will there be a glut of domain resellers who buy up domain names in foreign languages?
This is in the media at the moment especially Russian URL's.
Does anyone know?

[eelixduppy]

Not sure when or if they will exist. I'm sure it was thought of at some point, though. The current protocol uses ASCII which, as you might know, doesn't allow for these foreign characters. For foreign characters to exist, we'd have to move over to something like Unicode which would be a pretty big deal. Name servers around the world would have to be changed to use unicode and process it accordingly.

[bill]

DMOZ has used foreign languages in URLs for many years. Browse through their Japanese section:
[dmoz.org...]
Click any of the directory links and they will come out Japanese. This works for Russian and other languages as well.

IDNs (internationalized domain names) are another story. The basic problem with these is that a server or browser plug-in is required to resolve such names. Newer versions of Opera, FireFox and IE can handle the resolution of these names, but there are still many browsers that cannot. (The web is not always viewed by a PC.)

[eelixduppy]

Pretty cool. Learn something every day :)

I was thinking of domain names specifically, for some reason.

[garrybetting]

Thanks for that.
I heard Russia wants URL's in Russian and so do China.
Have you noticed how in these languages you get question marks in titles and the URL's cannot be in these characters?
But seen as Chinese and Indian alone will soon outnumber English users they will no doubt find a way.
I think it is funny if there is another domain name buy up like oringinally and middle men selling them on.

[bill]

I heard Russia wants URL's in Russian and so do China.

I think you mean domain names, not URLs or URIs. As shown, it's been possible to put different character sets into folder and file names for quite a while.

China already has a fully localized solution for this. It has been in operation for a few years now [webmasterworld.com]. Russia wants something similar in Cyrillic.

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], garrybetting!

this should give you the current status of the protocol for internationalized domain names:
[ietf.org...]

[garrybetting]

Thanks for that.

[pageoneresults]

Can someone explain to me what is happening here?

www.pàypal.com

Some of you know I'm on this mission to get so freakin' technical my brain hurts right now. In the process of our research, we uncovered the above. My programmer spent about 30 minutes and whipped up an example of Phishing using the above URI which resolves. It was rather convincing if you ask me. Does PayPal know about this stuff?

I would really like to know what is taking place above. I was shown something using the above domain that would surely cause some challenges for PayPal. I'm still going through some different combinations using various characters and am running across some interesting stuff. Not a lot, but enough to start sending signals through me "Tin Hat". Ting, ting, ting...

I thought you couldn't register these?

xn--pypal-rqa.com

I know about IDN Domains too...

IDN Domains are "Internationalized Domains Names", they make the use of special non-English characters possible (i.e. Umlauts like "ä", "ö" und "ü", other European Characters like "á", "é", "í"). These domains are subject to many temporary technical restrictions, for example users need an IDN compatible browser to visit them.

Ooops, in reading over our notes on this, we did uncover nomenclature that describes this...

Homograph Spoofing Attack
[en.wikipedia.org...]

[pageoneresults]

www.dynadot.com/domain/search2.html

I've been playing with that IDN Registration Search tool. Why is it that some of my domains are registered with certain characters? And, why can't I see those? Where are they? I'm confused?

And why does it show these as being available?

xn--

<added>I also see that they are now testing IDN domain names.

IDNwiki
[idn.icann.org...]