Comments on: Changes to Internet approved: Expect lots of annoying URLs now http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/06/27/changes-to-internet-approved-expect-lots-of-annoying-urls-now/ Gadgets, gear and computer hardware. Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:11:01 -0500 hourly 1 By: Paul http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/06/27/changes-to-internet-approved-expect-lots-of-annoying-urls-now/comment-page-1/#comment-750335 Paul Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:43:01 +0000 http://www.crunchgear.com/?p=28903#comment-750335 Allow me to geek out for a moment: Have you seen the way they're going to encode the non-ASCII international characters into the ASCII domain names? It's not UTF8 with % HEX HEX encoding, as you might expect from looking at any international URL. Oh no, that would be too logical. They invented a brand new encoding called Punycode to encode the Unicode characters. I'm not joking, check out RFC 3492. It's a fairly complex algorithm, and the output looks like gibberish. Example conversion of Chinese (simplified): u+4ED6 u+4EEC u+4E3A u+4EC0 u+4E48 u+4E0D u+8BF4 u+4E2D u+6587 Punycode: ihqwcrb4cv8a8dqg056pqjye Intuitive, eh? I guess it doesn't really matter since your browser will normally do the conversion for you, but still come on! Domain names are supposed to be readable! Allow me to geek out for a moment:
Have you seen the way they’re going to encode the non-ASCII international characters into the ASCII domain names? It’s not UTF8 with % HEX HEX encoding, as you might expect from looking at any international URL. Oh no, that would be too logical. They invented a brand new encoding called Punycode to encode the Unicode characters. I’m not joking, check out RFC 3492. It’s a fairly complex algorithm, and the output looks like gibberish. Example conversion of Chinese (simplified):
u+4ED6 u+4EEC u+4E3A u+4EC0 u+4E48 u+4E0D u+8BF4 u+4E2D u+6587
Punycode: ihqwcrb4cv8a8dqg056pqjye

Intuitive, eh? I guess it doesn’t really matter since your browser will normally do the conversion for you, but still come on! Domain names are supposed to be readable!

]]> By: greatslack http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/06/27/changes-to-internet-approved-expect-lots-of-annoying-urls-now/comment-page-1/#comment-750107 greatslack Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:38:37 +0000 http://www.crunchgear.com/?p=28903#comment-750107 Seems like a ploy to make a lot of people a lot of money. Also an opportunity for snobbery. "Oh, you've got your own website? That's cute. I've got my own TLD." Seems like a ploy to make a lot of people a lot of money. Also an opportunity for snobbery.

“Oh, you’ve got your own website? That’s cute. I’ve got my own TLD.”

]]>