Re: Not ASCII chars in domain name ???

[Tiger Technologies]

At 8/23/00 9:42 AM, DomainGuideBook.com wrote:

>Won't using non-ASCII characters in domain names destroy the globality of
>the Internet?

The underlying characters in these domain names are still ASCII (the 
system uses Unicode). They'll just look like gibberish ASCII to anyone 
who isn't seeing them in their native script system.

To use an example from the i-dns.com site, the user types in a name in a 
Japanese character set. This request is sent to a modified resolver that 
converts it to Unicode UTF-5 (an ASCII representation). It then does a 
lookup on an ASCII string like L6FDP645L316L7DFL40D.L16CL3F8.

People's e-mail addresses will look like [EMAIL PROTECTED] 
in ASCII, so it won't break anything.

In short, the DNS system would still work just fine, sending ASCII 
characters around. The only requirement is that the user's ISP change 
their resolver hint file to point to the i-dns root servers so it can do 
the Unicode conversion.

--
Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies