Idn.idn

[acronym007]

Ok, time to stick my hand in the hornet's nest. LOL.

What's up?
So here I am mentally debating the value or IDN.IDN in my head. My thoughts:

The bottom line, this cannot be successful with a simple plugin. All attempts to use plugins for domain names have failed in the past. Suppose someone had the name IDN.IDN or IDN.COM. If a company is doing well with the .IDN and someone attempts to reach it I can only imagine the frustration when they cannot access the website because of the lack of plugin at their office. So, how valuable can it really be?

Now, your turn. I know we discussed other times. I need a review. What are your opinions, successful or Junk? Please don't attack each other, be constructive and state some facts, thoughts, arguements why or why not. We're all in this together and we can benefit from sharing knowledge within our community.

My final thoughts are inconclusive, I really don't think it can successful in the long run for the reasons I stated above but there may be othe considerations I am missing. In reality as with any IDN it's all potential and what if's;. For now I delight in hearing my peers thoughts & comments.

Acro

 

[Explorer]

My final thoughts are inconclusive, I really don't think it can successful in the long run....
Acro

There is a theory out there that in the long run, people around the world should and will be able to type in URLs in their native languages. So, if you disagree with that theory, there might be very little value in going over details (plug-ins, release of IE7 this year or next, people speaking English in other countries very well, etc).

 

[DNWizardX9]

It is a common misconception.

A plugin is not necessary. IE 7 Beta 3 is now out. IE 7 has IDN functionality built in. Verisign produced a plugin early on however I would not install it(it was necessary as many ppl were using IE 6). Eventually when everything work out as planned via DNAME .com will resolve to .idn equivalent or a ccTLD will resolve to .jp or .cn in .idn equivalent. However the rollout is still being planned on what steps to take first etc.

 

[Rubber Duck]

Well at least you seem to be open to learning but your view are a bit blinkered. Hope we can help.

The bottom line, this cannot be successful with a simple plugin. All attempts to use plugins for domain names have failed in the past. Suppose someone had the name IDN.IDN or IDN.COM. If a company is doing well with the .IDN and someone attempts to reach it I can only imagine the frustration when they cannot access the website because of the lack of plugin at their office. So, how valuable can it really be?

No Pluggin required. All current browsers, with the exception of iE 6.0, which should just about be history within 3 months, support IDN.com and IDN.IDN straight out of the box. IE 6.0 has required a pluggin and that is precisely why, as you have pointed out that IDN have never suceeded. They never will until either IE 7.0 is released or everyone goes over to Mac, Firefox or Opera. As clearly that is not a likely scenario either, everything is contigent on the release of IE 7.0. Estimates vary, but I personally have this chalked in for the end of August.

IDN.com already resolve through the DNS, but ICANN cannot currently resolve any IDN.IDN.

China is the only place where IDN.IDN are currently working and this is achieved by a fudge within the ISP that adds a dot CN so the domains can be resolved at the second level under dot CN.

Now, your turn. I know we discussed other times. I need a review. What are your opinions, successful or Junk? Please don't attack each other, be constructive and state some facts, thoughts, arguements why or why not. We're all in this together and we can benefit from sharing knowledge within our community.

Well, what do want to know. The number of native English Speakers in the world is actually quite small in terms of the global population and already only makes up about 40% of the total internet population. It is an established fact that non-native speakers, given the choice, prefer their in general for their entire online experience to be in their mother tongue. The French, Germans and Scandanavians have not had a huge issue with thing to date because they language are fairly easily expressed in the ASCII character set, although obviously many characters are not available so substitutes are used. This generally makes for a bit of guess work but nothing most people couldn't handle. Once they get past the navigation stage they are instantly back into an environment where a full character set is preferred. However, even here it is apparent that Germans in particular prefer addresses that are correct rather than approximated. Not only have German IDN gone for large sums, but a significant proportion of them have migrated to Firefox for this reason.

When you get further a field the problem of navigation becomes more of a problem. It is apparent that the Japanese do not use direct navigation at present because it is too difficult by and large. Generally, they use search and then bookmark favourites. It seems there is very little type-in traffic in Japan because ASCII just does not provide a viable solution. Similar situation exists throughout Asia in various languages, notably Chinese, Korean, Russian, Hindi and Arabic. For getting on for 10 years now, the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans have been collaborating to bring IDN to fruition and have suffered huge frustrations, largely due to the intransigence of both ICANN and Microsoft. Both of these organisations, now however, realise that their very survival is contigent on the effective implementation of IDN, and moving at break neck speed, although not necessarily in the most effective manner to achieve its implementation.

IDN.IDN should be a reality within 12 months now. There is, however, some consternation as to what that means and frankly is has not yet been fully determined. Before then IDN.com, IDN.cn and others will be very much mainstream. These domains give an SEO advantage over ASCII domains which means their is such a compelling logic to their adoption, that the replacement of Romanji and Pinyin domains is inevitable.

There are essentially two proposals for the adoption of IDN.IDN. One is to place the punycode version of extension directly into the ICANN Root, the other is use Global Substitution through the DNAME protocol to normalise domains back into ASCII forms before using the Registry Nameservers.

The DNAME solution simply means that you would have the option of representing dot com in the various scripts/languages. This would not essentially involve the creation of new registries, but would simply increase the flexibility of the domains already registered under the existing TLDs.

The second solution normally referred to as NS is more contraversial, as potentially it forcibly means the creation of a new TLD in each script or language. These could potentially be used in one of two ways. One TLD could be forwarded to another to provide an alternative to DNAME or the new additions could be set up as new registries. Unfortunately, the policy wally brains in ICANN feel that this gives them an important function to perform, and regardless of the actual techical limitations of this solution, they consider it gives them a broad policy making remit. The nightmare scenario to many is that they may decide to establish a new dot com registery in every language and script. Of course this is not only technically impracticable, a legal minefield and also totally against the interest of the wider internet community, but would take too long to implement and is a political quagmire. Implementing this is about as likely as George Bush simultaneously being granted the Freedom of Pyongyang and Tehran. But they feel they need to excercise they incumbant duty to drive everybody mad exhausting all the options. I am sure Verisign will eventually drag them kicking and screaming to a sensible solution, but in the meantime you may expect considerable delays and abundant confusion. By the time matters are resolve you can expect IDN.com to be the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World.

The big thing with IDN, because it introduce thousands of additional characters, it creates the possibility of registering many more dot coms than have already been registered to date with the very limited ASCII character set. Unlike ASCII many of these domains will be single and double characters. Most Chinese words for example are just one or two characters in length, but you have about 5000 characters in everyday use. Because search engines can determine which site to rank from scripts/languages rather than from domain extension, this makes ccTLDs largely redundant from a purely navigational standpoint. This will mean that dot Com is going to be even more important globally. It is going to go from being the USA's ccTLD to being the World's ccTLD.

 

[Giantpanda]

First we need to understand what is an IDN.ascii, and what is IDN.idn.

Let's use an IDN.ccTLD domain ä¸*国.cn [China.cn] for example.

User <-- [ä¸*国.cn]--- (Software/Browser) --- [xn--fiqs8s.cn] --> Root Server

xn--fiqs8s.cn is no different from any ASCII domains like LOANS.cn in the registry, they are all ASCII domains. But why we call xn--fiqs8s.cn an IDN domain?

Because the browser makes it look like an Chinese (Unicode) domain. Whenever the software/browser sees a domain start with "XN--", it will apply "Punycode Scheme" formular to the ASCII script after "hyphen hyphen" and translate it into Unicode character(s). So in this case xn--fiqs8s.cn looks like ä¸*国.cn to the user.

And vice versa, when the user types ä¸*国.cn URL to the browser, the browser translates it to xn--fiqs8s.cn then sends it the Root server.

So, is IDN.ascii usable? valuable? Absolutely, 100% just like any other ASCII domains.

Now IDN.idn.

A domain we see is always with an extention like .cn, and we know xn--fiqs8s.cn is to be resolved at the root server in China.

Many people in many different countries ask, if we can make the domain part look like Chinese, why don't we also make its extention look like Chinese? like ä¸*国.ä¸*国

That's how the idea IDN.idn came from. Of course, it's very easy to achieve this.

1) If when the browser translates the domain (Punycode), it's also programmed to translate the extention at the same time, it's done. Or

2) ICANN can help China create a new Top Level Domain (ä¸*国) in the Global root server, and the new domain (ä¸*国) will be .XN--FIQS8S. So, ä¸*国.ä¸*国 will be resoved as xn--fiqs8s.XN--FIQS8S in ICANN's Root server.

User <-- [ä¸*国.ä¸*国]--- (Browser) --- [xn--fiqs8s.XN--FIQS8S] -> Root Server

Will they work? Absolutely, the project is now under discussion at ICANN.

IDN.ascii domains will become mainstream soon because they are seriously in demand in all non-English speaking countries. But if you want to know if IDN.idn is a good idea, my opinion is NO. I will try to present my argument later.

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Why is IDN.idn not needed?

Before we continue, I must emphesize again that IDN.com or IDN.cn or IDN.jp is urgently needed. Don't confuse IDN domain name with its extention.


Now try these:

1) If we have only one Top Level Domain in the world, do we need extentions for domains? Of course we don't, we can just use the name without extention.

2) If we have only 2 TLDs, we can make it easy to distinguish between them by grouping them into two TLDs .1 and .2, like LOANS.1 and LOANS.2.

3) Now we have a few gTLDs and more than two hundred ccTLDs, it's certainly much better to use 2 letters or 3 letters for extentions than using numbers because letters can have better representation.

From #1, #2 and #3, we can see the basic characteristic of domain extention:

A) Extentions are used to categorize domains, so that domains can be sent to the right root server to be resolved.

B) Extentions should be as short, simple and meaningful as possible.

From A) and B) we can conclude that IDN.com, IDN.cn, IDN.jp... are in their best form now, and ICANN should start their full deployment.

Just look at this domain http://www.和平.com it's so beautiful!

And it also gets me some income every month, because so many people love PEACE.

BUT wait a minute...

Some people in non-English speaking countries suggest we should translate the extentions into their local scripts as well, with these reason:

I) They don't have to shift the key to type the Latin extention.

II) They feel proud to see the extention in their own language.

I do know why I) and II) because I am a Chinese and I speak and write the language. But I can't find a sufficient reason to create a new "XN--" TLD in the root to satisfy our unnecessary wish.

I) Microsoft just need spending 15 minutes to modify the browser to allowed us to enter .cn or .com during the Chinese input mode without shifting.

II) Chinese are very familiar with Latin letters, they learn Pinyin in their elementary school and Latin letters are part of their life. When China sent its astronauts to the Space, all Chinese should feel proud to see the word ä¸*国 printed on the Spaceship. But we should not print ä¸*国 all over the places like washroom, bedroom, diningroom ... to make us proud, and certainly not at the domain extention where the simpler is the best.

If .cn, you only need 2 keystrokes. if .ä¸*国, you need 9 strokes by Pinyin Input Method (zhongguo + "Enter"). (9 - 2 = 7 strokes more)

Suppose China will have 500M netizens in the near future, and each net user enter average 10 domains a day.

500M x 7 x 10 x 365 = 12,775,000M = 12.775 Trillion strokes per year.

What a waste of human energy, not to mention if 1/3 of the users have IQ like me and input (zhongguo + "Enter") wrong one in every 3 entries .

Yes, some people now would say they have no problem inputing .ä¸*国 and that they like .ä¸*国 better, but when put it into practical use, the truth "simpler is better" will prevail, people will prefer .cn.

As for IDN.com, "com" has nothing to imply pride. There will be no one would feel proud to use 和平.公司 or 和平.商业. So, it's better for IDN.com to remain IDN.com, the king of all.

During this confused time of looking for names to map "com" to, I would like to quote a word of wisdom from China's "Art of War".

"以不变应万变" (No change is the best change)

(This is just my personal opinion)

 

[Rubber Duck]

This would rather suggest that if ICANN were to create hundreds of clone dot coms then they would all fall flat on their faces, people would just see them as cheap nasty and unnecessary immitiations of the Undisputed Champion Dot Com.

Sounds like the kind of cock-up ICANN can ill afford to make.