NEWSFLASH
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Recently, there has been extensive media coverage of the fact that from 1 March 2004, there will be the possibility of registering domain names that not only consist of the conventional 26 letters, ten numbers and the dash, but also characters with accents, such as é, ŕ and ö.
Unfortunately, little or no attention has been given to the fact that this is only possible for specific domain extensions. For some cctlds (like China and Japan) it has already been possible for some time to register using local characters. Even so for .com, .net and .org. However, Verisign (www.verisign.com) is still referring to a "testbed". That means that a domain name registered with an accented character may be deleted if the technical IDN standard were to change. Since 1 March 2004, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Hungary offer also the possibility of registering domain names with accented characters. DNS Belgium has decided, for the time being, not to offer any IDN domain names. The Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy and other European countries are still evaluating what to do. An important reason for their reluctance is the lack of tools. To be compatible with the past the DNS system can only operate with letters, numbers and a dash. To accept accented characters an algorithm was created, with which a name containing such characters is translated to a name beginning with "xn--". Followed by the rest of the name in encoded form. A domain name with accented characters can only be used by someone who possesses a browser that can encode/decode IDN names. Microsoft Internet Explorer (one of the most widely-used browsers on the Windows platform) does not yet support IDN. Admittedly, a plug-in can be downloaded from Verisign, and after it has been installed, you can surf to websites with an IDN name. There is a similar problem with e-mail programs. For a lot of other programs (such as chat programs), at present there is no support at all for IDN domain names. The person who possesses an accented domain name cannot be sure others will effectively be able to use this name in his accented form. However we have to mention that the name can be used in its encoded form. E.g. café.be becomes in its encoded form: xn--caf-dma.be. If you do not have a plug-in you are not able to send an email to info@café.be. An email to info@xn--caf-dma.be however could have the same effect but leads to confusion. For those reasons and because accented names are not universally usable we decided not to make them available. We evaluate regularly this matter and will certainly offer this possibility in the future. The large availability of enduser tools supporting IDN will certainly be one of the factors for this decision. UPDATE 13/11/2007 In the course of 2008 DNS BE will be implementing domain names containing accented characters following the IDN standard (Internationalised Domain Name). For more info see here. |
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