Website/Email addresses

[spook 0]

This might sound insanely stupid, but I’m curious so I’ll post it anyway…

Why do all website and email addresses use English characters? How come you don’t get pages that use Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Arabic etc letters?

I presume this has something to do with international internet access, but what stops a country the size of say, China, deciding that they want to use Chinese characters in email addresses?

[bobby12 0]

A URL like www.snowjapan.com just points to an IP such as 128.3.23.0. Theres an online DNS that is a look up table to match the URL name with the IP. So in theory I guess you could have a Chinese DNS.

 

The problem would be that not all PCs support chinese characters so those PCs would not be able to access those websites unless they were following links.

[marnix 0]

So you type it first in romanji, then convert it to kanji and then get to an website. sounds like you take and extra step (also looking for the right kanji out of a dozen)

[sava 0]

http://news.com.com/Engineers+seek+to+teach+the+Web+new+languages/2100-1023_3-242309.html

 

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working on a project that will allow foreign characters to become part of Internet domain names, which now only permit letters geared toward modern, Western European languages.