Discuss mailing list

[Alex Hanselka <alex AT opennicproject.org>]

On 2/15/2014 2:08 PM, Coyo wrote:
> A practical example of this is http://ουτοπία.δπθ.gr/
>
> It looks like unicode is not directly supported, but has an encoded
> form called Punycode.
>
> For example, http://xn--wkd-8cdx9d7hbd.org/
>
> On 2/15/2014 2:03 PM, Coyo wrote:
> > I have seen chinese, korean and vietnamese characters in second
> > and third level domain names, and I was wondering. Is it possible
> > to have unicode characters in the top level domain as well,
> > assuming the nameservers hosting the TLD all support international
> > domain names?
>
> > In other words, is a TLD like උʘຯᛜ, for instance, or ฿tc or Ⓐno as
> > more practical examples. Can TLDs support this in most
> > nameservers? I'm looking through doc.powerdns.com and cannot find
> > the word unicode or internationalization in it, but I've seen
> > international (unicode) second and third level domain names.
>
> > Thank you so much for your time and patience, guys.
It sure is possible! They are called Internationalized Domain Names
(IDN).  Some browsers will do all the punycode on the backend so you
still see the unicode, some don't (and this applys for second and third
level too).  There are a handful in use at this time with ICANN and more
on the way. I know Japanese みんな meaning all or everyone is currently
in preorder status.

Here are some links for future research :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_country_code_top-level_domain
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
http://icannwiki.com/index.php/New_gTLD_IDN_Applications (this is a list
of all of the proposed new IDNs for the gTLD thingy)