Chinese (Hanzi, Not Pinyin) Domain Names Launched - Scratching Under The Surface
NeuStar, which over sees the .BIZ TLD has announced it will issue domain names in Japanese and Chinese characters. From the press release "NeuStar's Chinese and Japanese IDN offerings make available more than 19,000 Han and 178 Katakana and Hiragana characters, which are commonly used in China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan, and in Chinese and Japanese communities around the world." Their implementation is compliant with ICANN and CNNIC's recommendations. only a matter of time for .COM, .NET and .ORG.
Their FAQ gives a brief overview of how IDNs (International Domain Names) are implemented:
Typically, when a browser sees a host name, it sends a request to the DNS resolver service. The resolver service then sends a request to a domain name server to return an IP address corresponding to that host name. When the IP address is returned, a connection is made to the appropriate Web server.
In the case of IDNs, when a browser sees either (1) a non-ASCII character host/domain name in its location bar, or (2) a URL with a non-ASCII domain part embedded in a web page, the application is required to convert the non-ASCII characters into a special encoded format (Punycode) using only the standard ASCII subset characters. Punycode is the official IETF standard that has been approved for converting IDN domains into machine-readable and resolvable ASCII domains.
Punycode is required for IDN conversion because a restriction (that only a subset of ASCII characters be used in URL/URI at the network protocol level) is still enforced, even though IDNs have been introduced.
Chinese Domain names (those ending in .CN) already use this Punycode style system. Check out the FAQ on CNNIC's website and if you don't believe me, try clicking this: 清华大学.cn.
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