Talk:Internationalized domain name

Comments
What is a "non-English" language? English is ***one*** language among possibly thousands of languages that are not English.

Indeed, English can itself be considered a non-Russian, non-Japanese, and non-Swahili language. What is your point? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.177.124.118 (talk) 18:32, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Making simple things complicated by grand-fathering haphazard beginnings is as if there is a powerful secret commercial purpose behind it. It is not ASCII that ought to be the basic code set but the Single-byte-character-set SBCS. UTF-8 has a standard method to bring most multiple code characters into the singl-byte representation. Radical, but an alternative to this mess is to decouple illogical association between shapes understood in abstract and numeric codes. This way, even Cyrillic can be mapped to SBCS. What we see is ALWAYS decided by a font. We should allow text be displayed using user preferred fonts. JC (talk) 15:40, 10 May 2017 (UTC)

Fair use
The fair use bot warnings make this page hard to read, I refactored it moving four warnings into this section, and moving another section created 2008 near the end, where folks interested in fresh issues might find it faster. Unrelated, it's nice to see that somebody found the blog entry about the 11 test TLDs last year. ;-) --217.184.142.58 (talk) 21:11, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:2ask2.gif
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Fair use rationale for Image:HindiIDN.PNG
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BetacommandBot 08:43, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Ukrainian IDN.png
Image:Ukrainian IDN.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot 19:11, 30 November 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Chinese-domain-name.png
Image:Chinese-domain-name.png is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

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BetacommandBot (talk) 21:48, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

Spoof
As reported on slashdot, IDN is at the root of a new way to spoof URLs. See http://www.shmoo.com/idn/ for examples and an explanation. If this problem is not quickly worked around, I would suggest mentioning it in the article. If the bug proves difficult to overcome, it could mean a lot for this standard's widespread adoption. Bgruber 19:44, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)


 * It should be mentioned anyway, since it has always been a major objection to any form of IDN. But it needs to be put into the context of the general debate about IDNs, which we don't have anything on at present. (The specific example given on http://www.shmoo.com/idn/ could be put in the IDNA article. Currently it's in Punycode, which is the wrong place.) --Zundark 20:05, 7 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * Safari has a fix in place for spoofs. Certain spoofable character sets are rendered in punycode to prevent fraud. Dread Lord C y b e r S k u l l ✎☠ 00:25, 9 March 2006 (UTC)

possible first page using IDN
http://räksmörgås.josefsson.org/ Should this be added as a small piece of trivia? :) porges 04:08, Mar 31, 2005 (UTC)

"label"
"In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied."

Will readers know what 'label' means here? What does it mean?

Joaquin


 * The meaning is explained in the first paragraph of the "ToASCII and ToUnicode" section, so I've added a forward reference to that section. --Zundark 08:11, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Verbal diarrhea
Diarrhea, possibly one of the most unpleasant words in English. Anyway, coming to an article about IDNs, am I really interested in "about:config" settings in Mozilla, or somebody registering paypal.com? I would remove that whole section on spoofing concerns; it can be treated with a simple link to the full article (which seems not to expand on the subject at all.) Miken32 23:48, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Examples
If the Wikipedia is to be linking to examples of domains using IDNA, should they really all be advertisers' sites? It would be better to link to, well, anything else. --holizz 11:03, 17 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Agreed. I did clean it up, but they have since been added back. --Ben 10:46, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

When Listing Examples for this page, Do not put links to sites that redirect to pages that aren't IDNs!. --68.239.46.12

Agreed. This is the sole reason why I started http://IDNSearch.net - to showcase real-life (not just ads landing pages) IDN-accessible sites. -- WilliamTan

I just poked my head into the discussion page here for the first time to mention my concerns about the examples and external links becoming far to large. Even the IDNSearch.net site, while good intentioned, looks too much like a free-for-all link page for my liking. There are already two images that show examples. Maybe the entire "example" section should be delted? Looks like too much of a spam-magnet to me. Wrs1864 13:24, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Safari
Safari 2.0.4 also treats the spoofed URL as http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com/

External link spam
A large portion of the external links in this article are just basically spam. The ad-to-content ratio is laughably skewed, and sometimes the domain exists just to sell one product and offers no other information. I've deleted a few so far, but I think many more could still be evaluated and then removed. The list was incredibly long anyway, and it still is pretty big after my edits. Thoughts? -Markusbradley 21:56, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

The first IDNA domains went up a few days ago. Where are they?
ICANN press releases about the first test IDNA domains going live appeared on the AP feed a few days ago. But I'm unable to find a link to the test domains. If someone can find the links, they should go in the article. --John Nagle 15:26, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * It sounds like they might not be available until 15 October (see the ICANN announcement). By the way, they aren't the first IDNA domains; they're the first top-level IDNA domains. --Zundark 16:29, 12 October 2007 (UTC)


 * In fact, the websites are already up, but they're not open to the public yet (they ask for a password). There's a list of them here (although I haven't verified this list). --Zundark 17:56, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Here's the list of links (now verified). But, as mentioned above, they currently require a password for access. --Zundark 19:11, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
 * simplified Chinese
 * Hindi
 * Russian
 * Korean
 * Yiddish
 * traditional Chinese
 * Persian
 * Tamil
 * Greek
 * Arabic
 * Japanese


 * The password protection has been removed now, but I'm still not sure whether it's appropriate to add the links to the article. (The sites are just MediaWiki wikis, and are not much use to people who don't speak any of the languages. They do, however, provide a simple demonstration of the IDNA TLDs.) --Zundark 14:52, 15 October 2007 (UTC)


 * In fact, there's a English-language gateway site at http://idn.icann.org, which I'll add to the article. --Zundark 15:47, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Missing info on 'Non-IDNA or non-ICANN registries that support non-ASCII domain names' section
In the last paragraph it says that during the "ICANN december meeting". The text doesnt mention the year. I thought it was important but couldn't find out the year. Just pointing it out if someone else wants to fix the article...200.84.244.129 (talk) 11:42, 12 January 2008 (UTC)


 * It was 2006. But this paragraph was in the wrong section, and the meeting is already mentioned in the timeline anyway, so I've just removed it. --Zundark (talk) 14:07, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

The "Example of Arabic IDN" image is barely readable
The "Example of Arabic IDN" image is barely readable. 202.78.240.7 (talk) 23:54, 3 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Fair enough. If you click on the image, you see it in its full 373-pixel width, which is a little better. --Jdlh  | Talk 19:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Why are they not directly supported by the next DNS standards?
I seems like an aggressive promotion of the english language. Are there sources backing up that is impossible to transitionally go to directly supporting unicode domains on DNS? I would find it extremely hard to believe that is 'impossible'. Only a non-scientific mind non versed in computer technology would make such outlandish claims. --Leladax (talk) 15:56, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * You are right, it is not "impossible" to directly use unicode, but the article doesn't claim it is impossible. It was, however, judge by experts working in this area to be very hard to change all the applications that currently assume that domain names (hostnames, actually) are restricted to a subset of ASCII and create a new standard (IDN) would be easier.  As far as the use of english, read the History of the Internet article.  It was no more an "aggressive promotion of english" than Minitel was an "aggressive promotion of french".  Wrs1864 (talk) 18:11, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I tend to think it's ignorance of only-english speaking people. They just don't care/understand/see how it is, how ugly it is to speak e.g. on tv to kids a domain name in an English manner; mainly the americans that largely control the internet base. --Leladax (talk) 22:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I would love to see the deployment plan for replacing the DNS lookup function on every single PC, laptop, mobile phone, Internet device and server in the whole world, simultaneously. With any other scenario, you're talking about living with multiple versions of the DNS protocol (or - coexistence of the DNS with another name resolution protocol) for a number of years - this has "issues", to put it mildly. Would love to see a realistic deployment plan that let us do that, too. Haven't seen any so far, and have looked for one since 1997 or so. --Alvestrand (talk) 21:42, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

List of software that supports IDN
It would be nice to have a list of software (from what version) that support IDN. There are mentioned some browsers. But it would be nice to have a more complete list of software for which the user supply the software with domain names. That includes browsers, Email clients (MUA), email transport software (MTA, MDA, POP, IMAP), whois, host, FTP clients, ssh tools, and many other internet tools that in one way or another takes a domain names as input or shows domain names as output.

Such a complete list should probably not be within this article, but probably a related article. --Jarl (talk) 19:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that a table with software that support IDN would be helpful and also might be a stimulance for adoption. What I can contribute is that presently Gmail webmail and Thunderbird do not support IDN email addresses and I don't know any email client that does. Erniecom (talk) 08:54, 1 June 2012 (UTC)

Here a list of software that supports IDN: http://www.denic.de/domains/internationalized-domain-names/idns-und-sicherheit/idn-faehige-programme.html Erniecom (talk) 05:45, 2 June 2012 (UTC)

To my knowlege currently no Browser supports IDNA2008. And they seem not to be willing to implement it any time soon. Browsers use wrong replacement i.e. ß -> ss instead of IDNA2008. Now there is some fear that browser will not show the same behaviour, which seems to be more important than correct IDNA2008 behaviour. 134.3.100.213 (talk) 15:08, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Chrome
Google's Chrome browser displays punycode in the adress bar. 82.169.112.106 (talk) 23:44, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Shouldn't this be included in the actual article? Either under the spoofing section or a new section regarding how different browsers display/handle IDN. 202.73.1.98 (talk) 03:10, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

Original research
The article's rife with it. See specifically the bit on homographs. -24.16.108.67 (talk) 23:23, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

fix needed
The name has a z, not internationalised. Yet the date in the footnotes are not the American style. Can the chief editor or his helpers fix it? I don't know how. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Q900 (talk • contribs) 23:48, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

potential for abuse?
I am curious about letters in non-ASCII character sets that look like ASCII characters, such as the Cyrillic о, а, е, І or the Greek ο. Can these characters be used to spoof a legitimate business ("please visit citybаnk.com to verify your account settings"). Are there any safeguards against such use? It would be useful to discuss these issues in the article. --İnfoCan (talk) 19:05, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * You don't see section 8, on Spoofing Concerns? I checked the History, and it wasn't just added today. Długosz (talk) 21:00, 2 November 2009 (UTC)
 * I didn't, I apologize. When I saw the long sections on chronology and domain name lists, my eyes glazed and I must have assumed the article was finished. Perhaps these sections should be moved to the very end, after the more interesting stuff. --İnfoCan (talk) 21:16, 8 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Good suggestion. I moved those sections to the end of the article. HaŋaRoa (talk) 20:58, 6 May 2010 (UTC)

Instructions on how to input such domain names?
I know Wikipedia is not an instruction manual, but one issue with the internationalized domain names is most people have no idea how, if they had to access, say, a Russian or Chinese website, that they could actually manually input the link on a standard Roman QWERTY keyboard (especially with many using iPads, etc). If not in this article directly, perhaps a link could be added to either another WP article or an off-site page that explains how one goes about it. It hasn't become an issue for me yet, but if I were to see a Russian Cyrillic domain name printed somewhere and I wanted/needed to access the site I wouldn't have a clue how to go about it. The only directions I've been able to find indicate that the only way is to locate a link online somewhere and click it. But that's unreasonably restrictive, especially for new sites that might not have been indexed. And how do you Google search something in non-Roman characters anyway? 68.146.71.145 (talk) 14:53, 28 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Unfortunatley I think the answer is "with great difficulty". You could switch to an alternate keyboard layout or copy/paste from a character map tool but both are likely to be pretty painful. Especially if you don't actually speak the language. You could also type the nameprepped representation of the name but good luck figuring out what that is. Plugwash (talk) 14:18, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Relevant criticism?
http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/idn.html seems to bring up some relevant concerns — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.191.60.249 (talk) 10:51, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Substandard
This article needs some serious work / reformatting

50.46.193.16 (talk) 14:51, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Internationalized domain name. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20081220044332/http://abcnews.go.com:80/Technology/wireStory?id=3813334 to http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=3813334
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20060422155224/http://www.apng.org:80/old/commission/idns/ to http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/

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External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Internationalized domain name. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20030823041046/http://www.minc.org:80/about/history/idns/idomain/ to http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/idomain/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20060811114532/http://www.apng.org:80/old/commission/idns/ipv6/ to http://www.apng.org/old/commission/idns/ipv6/

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"language-specific script"
What does it mean? Some examples are given, but I don't think it makes much sense. If a script is used in two languages, is it still language specific? In that case, aren't all scripts language-specific? Why not just say which characters are not allowed in plain DNS? The long s is an English alphabet character, it was used in the Bill of Rights. IDN is necessary to use this character, but right now, the article makes it sounds like IDN is only necessary for "language-spefific" things, is this some kind of fancy synonym to "exotic"? --95.222.26.132 (talk) 11:16, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 3 one external links on Internationalized domain name. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20030823041200/http://www.minc.org:80/about/history/idns/iname/ to http://www.minc.org/about/history/idns/iname/
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20041110195336/http://www.minc.org:80/oldminc/old/meetings/minc_20000327.html to http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old//meetings/minc_20000327.html
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20040126052853/http://www.minc.org:80/about/history/ to http://www.minc.org/about/history/

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External links modified
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I have just added archive links to 2 one external links on Internationalized domain name. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive {newarchive} to http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/
 * Added archive {newarchive} to http://www.minc.org/oldminc/old/meetings/sanfrancisco_20000512/testing_SFO.htm

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Merge Emoji domain into this article
An emoji domain is an IDN. There's nothing special or interesting about them that would warrant a separate article (they're not even widely used). As such, I think we can move some of the contents of that article into a small section here. --ChiveFungi (talk) 11:46, 4 September 2017 (UTC)


 * Respectfully, I see where you're coming from, but disagree. While it's true that an emoji domain is an IDN, they have a special set of concerns / history apart from standard IDN domains. Regardless of subjective interest, there's a fair amount of news coverage of emoji domains, so much so that searches for "emoji domain" have passed "IDN domain" in Google Trends. There's been an explosion of interest in the last year: registration numbers (estimated around 22,000 as of Sep 2017) are larger than that of many new gTLDs. Let's say you want to know more about emoji domains, you're going to want to know about browser compatibility, why you can't register new dotcoms, what ccTLDs accept emoji, etc... given that "emoji domain" is a settled term of art in common usage, those factors warrant an emoji domain article. Just as developers began to embrace UTF8 in response to demands from emoji users, this is an excellent opportunity to educate the public about IDN, punycode, and the underpinnings of the DNS system. --Jon90210 (talk) 17:18, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Allowed character set?
Which characters are allowed in the IDN? Only a-zA-Z0-9- and "non-ASCII characters"? Or also ASCII characters that are neither numbers nor letters, e.g. "! ? ^ :" etc. Where is that defined? --RokerHRO (talk) 12:20, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

5% or 20%?
> ... While the Arab region represents 5 percent of the world's population ...

That's a severe under-estimation within the article's context. The Al-Quran being a sacred text it is printed in its original arabic language, so the majority of app. one billion muslim people around he world can read some degree of arabic, regardless of their mother tongue. Arabic acts as "lingua franca" for the crescent moon cultural sphere. As such, arabic domain names have a much larger global significance than just 5%, e.g consider the recent rise of Al-Jazeera as an international news powerhouse. 94.21.160.82 (talk) 16:03, 3 January 2023 (UTC)