More writing systems for Internet addresses

According to a recent article in the Guardian Unlimited, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) is working to facilitate internationalized domain names (IDNs) for the Internet: Web site URLs and E-mail addresses available in other writing systems like Chinese characters.

I was unaware that IDNs already exist in countries like China, Japan, Korea, Israel, Iran, and Syria (in Japan for three years now). However, IDNs are currently used only within the networks of the particular country.

There is a danger of the global Internet breaking up along writing-system lines because the bulk of the world doesn’t like being limited to the permitted 26 letters, 10 numerals, and hyphen of the foreign system of ASCII, or American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Western European languages like French and Spanish can’t even get accented vowels for domain names in ASCII. (For word processing, ASCII encodes 128 items: the 26 uppercase letters, 26 lowercase letters, 10 numerals, 33 punctuation marks and symbols, and 33 old-fashioned control characters for teletypes and such. The extended ASCII set doubles the size to 256 to include many accented vowels, non-English punctuation, etc.)

Here’s an example of what they’re talking about with IDNs. Japan’s Mitsubishi Corporation has a traditional domain name.

http://www.mitsubishi.com/

That URL has links to Japanese and English site indexes. Mitsubishi also has a Japanese-language domain name that either only works in Japan or is just a placeholder.

http://三菱.jp/

That gets encoded with an “xn--” prefix and converted to ASCII as the following.

http://xn--ehq172k.jp/

For me, perhaps because my ISP is in the U.S., that URL redirects to the English site below.

http://www.mitsubishicorp.com/en/index.html

UPDATE 2 (October 11, 2007): Now, a year later, that redirects to the Japanese-language site: http://www.mitsubishi.com/j/.

Someday, they might have something like the following.

http://三菱.商業­/

I’m replacing “.com” with the Japanese word shougyou, “commerce” or “business.” I don’t know if they’ll use that, but it would be a logical choice. Japan might still have to use a designation for “Japan” like “.日本” because most of their characters are shared with the inventor of them, China. The “Mitsubishi” characters mean “three diamond-shapes,” as used in the logo. The native Japanese word mitsu, usually mittsu, is “three.” Hishi, getting voiced in a compound to -bishi, means “water chestnut,” and it’s used to describe a diamond shape or rhombus.

UPDATE (August 6, 2006): Within its own country, China has added .公司¸ (.gongsi, .com; “company,” “corporation”) .网络 (.wangluo, .net; “network”), and .中国 (.zhongguo, .cn; “China”) as top-level domains.

According to Japan Registry Services (administrator of Japan’s .jp top-level domain), as of August 1, 2006, there are 364,915 Japanese sites in ASCII and 123,946 in Japanese characters.

I can understand why other countries are upset. I can also understand why they don’t like America’s ICANN (Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) being in charge of approving their writing systems for addresses on the Internet. You would think Unicode’s encoding of so many writing systems would have gotten us all to a multilingual-domained Internet already, but ICANN has been working out the technological challenges very slowly over the last six years.

One problem with IDNs on the entire Internet will be increased opportunities for domain-name spoofing. In addition to URLs with numeral 0 replacing letter O, there could be URLs with Greek capital beta replacing the identical-looking Latin capital B.