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bombcar • yesterday at 9:30 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

The reality is that unless your in the US or "most" of Europe, you're going to WANT Unicode domain names - people in china are mostly fine with http://www.china.cn but they're going to really want to use their own language https://xn--fiq8ituh5mn9d1qbc28lu5dusc.xn--fiqs8s or https://xn--mgbeiue0iwb.xn--ngbc5azd - https://xn--wgv71a119e.jp

Demanding that everyone use our alphabet because we're too dumb to recognize the difference between google.com and xn--ggle-55da.com is the worst kind of "security through superior firepower"

(the fact that HN shows these correctly in the EDIT window but have to dump to punycode in display is sad, tbh)


Replies

duskwuff • yesterday at 11:02 PM

Not even "most" of Europe - almost all European languages use diacritics to some extent or another. In the context of domain names, some words are comprehensible with the diacritics stripped, but there's some loss of precision. (For instance, an "ñ" is critical if you're trying to say "happy new year" in Spanish...)

octoberfranklin • today at 12:06 AM

UCS-2 (i.e. Javascript, 16-bit character space) has enough codepoints for every language still spoken except Chinese (even after undoing Han Unification, which was dumb).

Unicode is China forcing variable-length character encodings on the rest of the world.

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