[bbg]

It's been a year already, and still I don't think I've ever visited a non-Latin-script URL. You would think the web would be the end of parochialism.

[veidr]

As another anecdotal data point, I visit non-Latin URLs almost every day working in Tokyo. For example,

http://www.amazon.co.jp/自転車-カテゴリー別/b/ref=sa_menu_bic9?node=1...

Although I can't really figure out why they bother localizing that one component of their URL, when they have all that gibberish-in-any-language crap at the end.

That is just an internationalized resource identifier (IRI), which is a different thing--and more widely supported--than an internationalized domain name (IDN). I too seldom use those in practice.

Because the part of the URL after the actual host/domain doesn't involve the DNS system, progress was more quickly made there.

More info: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/idn-and-iri/

[aw3c2]

Where do you live? Do you use non-latin characters every day? Do you read langauges that use non-latin characters?

[ujjvala]

What would happen to top level domain names like .com, .net etc ? Even they use non-latin characters before .com, .net etc "com", "net" is still Latin.

[squeed]

Not exactly. There are already IDN TLDs in existence.

More specifically, the "." is still a separator. Any component of the domain name can independently have xn-- and it will be interpreted as Punycode. Today you could register ujjvala.السعودية and it would be completely valid.

[codelion]

I don't think they would let . be part of beginning or ending of the domain name.

[aw3c2]

You can have http://ai/ so I guess you can have anything.

[irragal]

And I thought x.org was unusually short...

[ujjvala]

. is by itself a Latin character.