The Traveler

September 16, 2009 on 1:07 pm | In New Features, Rants by Josh Jones | 20 Comments

A cheaper way to travel!

Oh, I’ve been around.

And not just the block, and not just the bend.

I’ve been to like, 49 U.S. states. And like, 38 countries. And I know cause like, I’ve got a spreadsheet.

And I’ve seen some crazy crapola on those travels.

I’ve seen it rain for three days straight in Riyadh and sunny for three minutes straight on Mount Wai’ale’ale. I’ve seen an entire baseball stadium of Japanese people pack out their trash, and I’ve had my balls grabbed by a Chinese guy in a panda suit.

But there’s one thing I’ve never seen, not once in this whole wide, wild world.

Did anybody get a good look at the panda guy?!

An International Domain Name (IDN)

Not once.

Apparently, at some registrars you can register things like お元気ですか.com … and they’ll actually work in web browsers! Maybe even some email clients?

Silly-ly, the way it works is kind of silly… it actually just translates お元気ですか.com into a regular ascii domain like xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com … and that is what actually shows up in the browser bar (at least in most browsers)!

Anyway, we always thought that was so silly that we never bothered offering IDN registration at DreamHost. We do of course allow hosting IDN domains with us (you just enter the domain into our panel as xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com or whatever), and currently host over 4,000 of them.

We just thought actually registering them was a lot of work for not a lot of gain.

Fun as it is to program with registry APIs.

A lot of work?

What’s so hard about it? Shouldn’t we be able to register xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com just like any other .com domain? What extra set up is there?

You’d think that! In fact, I’d think that too!

But no, the registries all require us registrars to specifically activate the ability to register IDNs … and when submitting them we also have to submit what language they’re in!

Why this matters is beyond me. In fact, when you register .com and .net domains, you have a choice of over 100 languages, and they don’t seem to really care what you pick most of the time. However, when you register .org and .info domains you have a choice of only 10 languages, and they’re an odd selection, and they do care.

Those ten languages are: Danish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

Notice any missing? Let’s see, here are the world’s ten most “popular” languages, by native-speaking population:

1. Mandarin Chinese – 882 million (nope)
2. Spanish – 325 million
3. English – 312-380 million (N/A)
4. Arabic – 206-422 million (nope)
5. Hindi – 181 million (nope)
6. Portuguese – 178 million (nope)
7. Bengali – 173 million (nope)
8. Russian – 146 million (nope)
9. Japanese – 128 million (nope)
10. German – 96 million

For crying out loud, they don’t even have FRENCH! Not that I blame them, nyuk nyuk!!

There is just one son, and a golden spoon.

What The Heck

Despite all these short-comings and dubious benefits, we’ve decided to bite the bullet and go ahead and start registering IDNs anyway!

So go crazy… simply visit our registrations area and enter whatever crazy (utf-8 encoded) characters you want … followed by .com (or .net/.org/.info)!

Of course, you still can’t register domains with spaces in them, REALLY weird utf-8 characters, or mix between left-to-right languages and right-to-left languages. And as I mentioned before, .org and .info are practically useless.

So what I mean to say is, taking into consideration those caveats, go crazy!!

And watch out for Chinese guys in panda suits.

20 Responses to “The Traveler”

  1. Brendan Kidwell Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    > when you register .org and .info domains you have a choice of only 10 languages, and they’re an odd selection, and they do care. … Danish, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Spanish, and Swedish.

    So… you must specify a language when you register .org or .info, and it can’t be English or Chinese?

  2. Josh Jones Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Well, if it’s all regular English characters, that’s just a regular domain so all this IDN stuff doesn’t apply.

    If you use any UTF-8 crazy characters like 気 though, it’s an IDN domain name… and for .org and .info, THOSE domains can only only contain UTF-8 characters from the ten languages mentioned above.

    STRANGE BUT TRUE!

  3. Jim Says:
    September 16th, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    Where can I get one of those hamster wheels? lol

  4. Technologically behind Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 12:52 am

    Please, pretty please, remember to register also the ascii-variant of the domain name… I hate it when IDNs do not work.

  5. Benerhos Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 6:16 pm

    Hi. I was wondering if you were the same Josh Jones that created Bomberman for MSDOS? I used to play this game a lot when I was younger and I’m trying to get it again.

    Thanks.

  6. Christian Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    Hi; what about reg of domains like .dk?

  7. Gorm Says:
    September 17th, 2009 at 11:48 pm

    This is nice, but would prefer if we could register .co.uk and other international top level domains . . .

  8. ericb2038 Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 12:58 am

    I concur with Gorm. International TLD would be nice
    (.fr even, yes I’am French (and you SHOULD blame the Icann for not having utf8 french domain names :)))

    Bur really international TLD would be great (not that it’s too complicated to register then point the DNS to DreamHost, but it’d be better to have a one stop only registrar, with the auto renew features, and all the nice alerts that DH robots send, instead of juggling between the local registrars, trying to remember which domain is regged where…)

  9. Eddie Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 1:52 am

    I would also like to request support for international TLD. I have a .co.uk that I would love to move to dreamhost, but as far as I can tell, this isn’t possible right now.

  10. טכנאי מחשבים Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 4:39 am

    I got about ten of those in hebrew and they really helping those sites, SEO wise.

  11. Nick Lamb Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 5:51 am

    Because the COM registry is so poorly run by Verisign you can register any IDN name in it, even confusing names useful only to criminals for phishing and so on. So major vendors like Mozilla ignore these IDNs (you see xn-example.com instead) for display purposes to protect users.

    Whereas TLDs like ORG have policies in place to ensure IDNs aren’t used to create deliberately confusing names, so your choices are more restricted, but vendors like Mozilla will honour these IDNs for display purposes, you will see the IDN in the URL bar.

    Yes, Verisign are the same people whose “certificate authority” doesn’t actually certify anything except that you paid them money.

  12. Rob Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 5:55 am

    Again, real international domains. Not being able to register co.uk domains at Dreamhost sends wads of my cash to other companies. I’d transfer them all to Dreamhost if I had the option and I’m sure I’m not alone, think of that extra revenue stream in these hard times… Are you guys running a business ; )

  13. Donk Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 11:40 am

    Benerhos,

    A little googling brings up this Bomberman webpage by a Josh Jones:

    http://www.newdream.net/sb4/

    Who happens to host on w/ DreamHost:

    http://www.newdream.net/

    So I think you found the guy you’re looking for ;)

  14. mahtomayto Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    I don’t understand the problem. Browsers will translate non-ASCII domain names to punycode, they just don’t always show the special characters in the address bar to prevent phishing. (Firefox has a blacklist/whitelist filter: network.IDN.* prefs in about:config.) Maybe there’s an input filter too, but that’s just a browser issue.

    Are you saying that registries reject any punycoded domain name if it “isn’t a word” in those ten languages or contains other characters? Apparently that’s not the case, because your example お元気ですか.com has been successfully registered at Dreamhost.

  15. cstein Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    soooooo, who’s your panda friend?

  16. Jeevan Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 3:02 pm

    More great news. Ill be on the lookout for guys in panda suit.

  17. Josh Jones Says:
    September 18th, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    Hey Benerhos,

    Not me! Though I will kick anybody’s ass at any version of bomberman, anytime, anywhere… and I did make that super bomberman 4 website a lonnnnnnnng time ago! But only as a fan.

    And yeah, we’ll have to consider .co.uk.. but then we’re going to have to do like ALL of them. And make SOOOO much money. Sigh.

    And mahtomayto, .com and .net are fine, it’s .org and .info who will reject your domain if it’s got characters in languages other than the 10 they support! I guess what nick is saying is that maybe .org and .info don’t support french because its special characters look too much like english? A la waçhovia.org? I’m not 100% convinced that’s the reason, since they don’t allow Chinese or Japanese words either and those aren’t too likely to be used for phishing (at least not for english-speakers)…!

  18. Allison Davis Says:
    September 19th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

    Love the international domains, might have to pick one up so we can have our own shortening service for the site!

  19. Julius Davies Says:
    September 26th, 2009 at 11:25 am

    I wonder what people are supposed to put in the SSL certificate?

    CN=xn--t8jc5b1c114xnw7a.com

    CN=お元気ですか.com

    ???

  20. Fred Mackey Says:
    October 28th, 2009 at 9:32 pm

    Found a coupon code for Name Cheap at http://www.namecheappromo.com

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