Chinese Character url - would that make sense?

Joachim
 February 03, 2008 at 05:59 PM posted in General Discussion

I was just wondering if having url in Chinese characters would make sense. One could have things like 中文播客。中国 .

Does that make sense at all? Would it make anything easier for Chinese users?

How could I register a Chinese character domain e.g. in Germany?

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goulnik
 February 04, 2008 at 02:33 PM

as a matter of fact, CPod has been using hanzi in URLs all along for advanced and media lessons, e.g. http://chinesepod.com/lessons/%e4%b8%9c%e4%ba%ac/ on Tokyo. It displays as %e4%b8%9c%e4%ba%ac which is 东京 encoded as UTF8 (I think), i.e. Unicode

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Joachim
 February 04, 2008 at 01:57 PM

I am still unsure, of things would be easier for anyone with url in Chinese. As we have umlauts in German (ä,ö,ü), some companies or individuals might prefer an url like müller.de instead of mueller.de. Sometimes there is also a subtle difference between someone called e.g. Hueber or Hüber (the earlier being something specifically Bavarian). Enabling umlauts and other characters with diacritics might boost some national egos and avoid misunderstandings. With Chinese characters I am not so sure. As we all know, Chinese has a lot of homophones so an url like 请问.com or 请吻.com might be easier to differentiate than written as qingwen.com.

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goulnik
 February 03, 2008 at 08:48 PM

...the latter is something fully under your control (i.e. you set up on your webserver), whereas the former is subject to ICANN and other registry rules (i.e. the internet governing body)

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goulnik
 February 03, 2008 at 08:41 PM

Bazza, these are actually 2 different things, a domain name in Chinese (and this is possible with things such as xxx..中国 or yyy.公司.中国 much as .uk or .co.uk vs other parts of the URL, such as the path in zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中文

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henning
 February 03, 2008 at 08:25 PM

Two links with RFCs:

http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc4690.html

http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc3492.html

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bazza
 February 03, 2008 at 08:10 PM

zh.wikipedia.org uses them, they only show correctly at the bottom of your browser window though, in your address bar it will be something like:

zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%A6%96%E9%A1%B5

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goulnik
 February 03, 2008 at 07:35 PM

these are called IDNs, int'lized domain names. They are available in some TLDs (e.g. .com or .net) with different rules, but overall pretty messy as they are encoding workarounds resolving into ASCII...

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xiaohu
 February 03, 2008 at 06:27 PM

I would love to have a 2nd interface like in cslpod.com. They give you the ability to change the interface between English, Chinese, and Japanese. I always wondered why Chinesepod.com doesn't have that.