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IDNs are comming to an end.

Why? Because the distinction between an IDN and a regular domain is about to disappear.

Most people didn't notice IDNs before IE7, and they won't notice them for sure after IE7.

All that remains is simply, domains, and now, domains can come in various languages. That's all. Just as it should have been.

Nobody talks of 'multilingual file names' anymore. They just use them.

The same thing is about to happend to domain names.

Another way to look at this:

Francais.com is a typo or misspelling domain of Fran�ais.com.

Yandex.com is a transliterated (and therefore of little value) version of ??????.com.

What is kami.jp worth compared to ?.jp? Not much. Possibly, just a "cool" Latin letter domain for branding purposes.

What is BJFDC.com worth now that we have ?????.com? Nothing. Zero.

Typos, misspellings, transliterations, and everthing else, like pinyin abbreviations, will be priced at what they are: close to worthless in most cases.

Most people don't know there is a domain market, but most people who are aware of the internet know what a domain is.

On the other hand, IDN is a useless nerd distinction for an enabling technology. A term that is outliving its usefullness as we speak, as that technology becomes mainstream and part of the domain name system used by everyone.

Analysis by http://idnin.com/

Interesting post. I wonder if there will be a place for both IDN's, and their simple ascii version. Sometimes it is just easier to type in an ascii domain, especially for English speakers.

what nonsense is your reply?  Because it is easier for the people on countries that write in western alphabet and that dont represent less than 0.5% of the visitors, people in Asia -like chinese and japanese- should not use IDNs?

People write in japanese here, the domain should be in japanese.

What do I win with a  www.difficult-to-type-and-difficult-to-read-domain-for-the-99-per-cent-of-my-customers.com ?

According to your reply,  I can have a gem for 99% of my visitors but i shouldnt use it because in a far far away land where people speak other languages a Curious George one day once a year maybe wants to visit a website in other language? Cmon....

You make a good point. We should be sensitive to the language preference of the users of a domain.

dynadot_staff was just wondering if there would still be some value to ascii equivalents of IDN domains. I think there will still be some value. For example tokyo.jp will still have some value, porbably as a destination for people who speak English as a primary language, while TOKYO-IN-JAPANESE.jp would be for Japanese people. However, the value of tokyo.jp would be much much less.

. . . which was the gift of the United States to the world. The World Wide Web, another anglophone (in this case British) gift to the world, has, happily, evolved into a multilingual, multialphabetic overlay on what is still an ASCII Internet. IDN domains cannot be used as legal e-mail addresses, which will *forever* limit their utility. Heck, even the WWW overlay has not matured sufficiently--or its users haven't matured sufficiently--to make non-ASCII text nonproblematic. d_c_north woodstock_us_1's original post, for example, displayed the non-ASCII portions as gibberish and my browser is set to the international standard Unicode encoding (UTF-8). Changing it to ISO Latin 1 (i.e. Western[!]) got me the cedilla in fran�ais, but nothing could get me the Japanese glyphs. Either they were entered in some proprietary (Microsoft, perhaps?) standard or Dynadot's forum software doesn't support UTF-8. This itself illustrates that only Web pages have any chance of displaying non-ASCII text correctly. Otherwise, it's an ASCII world. Lest you think I'm some sort of English-first xenophobe, my native language doesn't use the Latin alphabet; I'm a professor of a European language that uses non-ASCII glyphs ("high" ASCII glyphs, actually); and I lived, worked, and loved in Asia. I wish the Internet were truly language agnostic, but it ain't. The person with the ball gets to chose the game--and the rules.

Email and IDN are available now with the Verisign plug-in and should be available with Vista in January.  Mail servers have no trouble with it, the clients (Outlook, etc) are the problem for now.  This is a simple fix, so have patience.

yeah it was an "english" gift, but people in Japan like japanese gifts. Different cultures, different languages.

And yeah dynadot should use UTF-8 on this forum.

My post was sent in all pure utf-8. It seems this forum only takes Latin-2 but not the full range of Unicode.

You can see the original, with Japanese and Chinese text here: http://idnin.com/idn/viewtopic.php?id=70

I think people overrate email. There is, frankly, little money in email. The big money is in domain names, and advertising them, and advertising on them, as websites, destinations, billboards, if you may.

Direct navigation in most language of the world was heretofore impossible. It now works. And not only with the Vista update. Just get IE7. In the US, IE7 is comming in an autoupdate as we speak, and Japan is not far behind.

Hopefully, ASCII will become an historical footnote and UTF-8 will be common here in the USA.  

It is strange to NOT be able to post in foreign languages.  

Romanization is funny, and it is very '20th century'.  

Unfortunately, this is the 21st Century.

Sorry, these forums do not support UTF-8 yet. We are working on it.