[nanotone]

On the penultimate paragraph, and somewhat of a tangent:

Wow, I'd completely forgotten that you could have Unicode in domain names, and I suspect a lot of people don't think about it very much either. In my limited experience, even Chinese-only websites rarely stray from normal alphanumeric domains, even though the people visiting those sites could easily type out URLs with Chinese glyphs.

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but it seems that with good alphanumeric domains becoming less available, cool/clever/classy Unicode domains could be a viable alternative, given an appropriate purpose -- Google would probably not want one -- and a techie enough audience. When [for which sites?] and how often do people actually type URLs?

Example: a friend of mine did a cheeky web branding project a while ago named "Heart Star Heart"... ♥★♥.com would have been perfect.

EDIT: I should probably do more research on this myself, but it looks like there's some mysterious isomorphism between Unicode domains and "normal" domains. Firefox renders U+272A in http://✪df.ws/e7m correctly but changes its text to http://xn--df-oiy.ws/e7m and when I access ♥★♥.com my ISP complains that xn--p3hxmb.com doesn't exist. Anybody know what the isomorphism actually is?

[natrius]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

[showerst]

I believe it has something to do with security, when browsers first added unicode url support there were issues with hackers and spammers using blank and lookalike unicode characters to trick people into visiting shady domains.

Related: http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2009/mfsa2009-50.ht...

I'm not 100% sure of this though, hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

[sorbits]

URLs do not allow unicode but most user agents support http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

That said, non-ASCII URLs suck because not everyone can type them. Imagine being a tourist in Tokyo who has to lookup a restaurant on your laptop or having to lookup the product page for this gadget you bought in China…

[nanotone]

Right. As I noted above, it's absolutely not acceptable for some situations, particularly those where you want lost or confused people to look you up. But I can still think of plenty of other situations, and was merely pointing out the disparity between the number of Unicode URLs I've encountered and the number I'd expect to have encountered, given all the possibilities.