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Gmail can support chinese domain to real domain?

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

Sunday, April 29, 2007
17 years ago2,696 views

http://hongxiaowan.googlepages.com/gmail-chinese-domain.png
I do not konw is Gmail did it or FF did it?

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Firefox. It's part of official international domain names standard, supported by browsers such as Firefox or Opera.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

For example look at the link below. I wrote "żółw.pl", Philipp's software displayed "żółw.pl", but Firefox changed it on the fly into domain's decoded form. In IE (without special plugin) this link wouldn't work at all.

http://żółw.pl

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

Seeing xn--w-uga1v8h.pl in the address bar is so horribly broken that these characters likely never will take off. If I understand it correctly, phishing (e.g. "góogle.com/login") destroyed this technology.

Ludwik Trammer [PersonRank 10]

17 years ago #

> If I understand it correctly, phishing destroyed this technology.

You are right. The domain-decoding process was supposed to be transparent for the user. Decoded version was intended for backward compatibility with a DNS system only. Certainly not for presentation to the users.

And, yes, than scammers realized that some UTF-8 characters, that can be used in an international domains, in certain conditions looks the same as some standard ASCII letters. "o" and "ó" looks similar, but you can spot the difference. But for example some Russian characters (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_alphabet) looks exactly like other characters from Latin alphabet – as long as you don't make them uppercase or put them into italics.

Because of that Firefox team introduced a "temporary" solution of presenting users with decoded version of international domains.

But what REALLY destroyed this technology, both before and after Firefox's "solution" is of course what destroyed most of new internet technologies – lack of support in IE. This technology worked in the way that was originally intended in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari for some time. Nobody used it because nobody would advertise domain that doesn't work in IE. And then when Firefox decided to "temporarily" show decoded domains there was ideas for long-term solutions. For example using icons or colors to to distinguish international domains. But nobody worked on this, because this technology was dead anyway. Because of IE.

Right now there is only one way this technology could be useful for some people. In Polish, and many other languages like Deutsch of French, in addition to Latin characters there are characters with special marks.

For example in Polish we have:
"Ł" that looks similar to "L", but you read it like English "W"
"ó" that looks similar to "o", but you read it as English "oo" ("u")
"ć", "ś", "ź", "ż", "ą" and "ę" that looks similar to "c", "s", "z", "a" and "e", and I'm not sure there is a way to write this sounds in standard Latin alphabet.

So people register domains with similar standard chars, instead of char specific to national alphabet.

So for example the city of Kraków has www.krakow.pl and the city of Wrocław has www.wroclaw.pl

I think people with such domains should IN ADDITION register international domains and redirect people to standard domains. So for example krakow.pl should also register kraków.pl and people who by mistake used national char should be redirected from kraków.pl to krakow.pl

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