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The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in non-Latin script, an official said Monday.
This would be the BIGGEST mistake modern man has ever made.
The new "Tower of Babel" approach to the internet domain WILL set back modern evolution of knowledge to a non-growth state.
Until now, the whole world is getting smarter at every web search, but changing the domains to names that cannot be searched will create an irrepairable communication gap!!
Who the hell is behind all this? Another "mob control scheme" begins.
#1 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 1:36 AM EDTWhat you're worried about has already come to pass. The web is already full of unreadable heiroglyphics. This new change will only affect the letters between www. and .com. Basically if the Chinese want to make a website with a funky character in the name they can. For all practical purposes China and Taiwan already firewall off ( and in ) their Internet traffic, so I can't imagine it will hurt more than what they already do.
but changing the domains to names that cannot be searched will
What does that mean? you can search for anything that is indexed by a search engine, regardless of what language it may be in. Whether I search google for "yahoo" or "雅虎" it still finds yahoo, and yahoo could change their actual domain name to whatever they want and google would still find it.
Maybe this will make it harder for some people to recognize or remember domain names, since most of the world has at least some familiarity with the latin alphabet, and only those that speak languages with more complicated scripts tend to know those scripts, but if a company or website has interest in reaching those people too, I am sure they will register their site with multiple domain names.
I'm not sure that the change is really necessary though, since most people simply keyword search for websites anyway, I do not think most people actually type the url into their browser (except for google.com so they can search for the thing they really want).
#2 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 3:23 AM EDTYou're right. A Chinese domain name would only be useful to someone who reads Chinese, has installed the language pack on their computer and has a simplified Chinese keyboard. I still don't know what the OP is complaining about, since the body of the webpage will invariably be Chinese as well. There is nothing there to read, see or miss unless he can read Chinese, in which case he should quit complaining. Google knows what country you're in ( usually ) and it will throw out the mumbo-jumbo results by default.
You can search for webpages written in specific languages too. Google has an advanced search option that allows you to do this already. So if you were interested in websites that had non-latin letter domain names you could find them. I imagine this search feature would work similarly with the domains when searching for foreign language pages.
This just makes the web more accessible to people who commonly use characters other than latin alphabet characters.
I have no problem with this. Might just learn something new. I'm a firm believer in the old adage "When you stop learning, you start dyin'".
#3 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 5:29 AM EDTTo Michael-302807:
In the words of that ancient philosopher: 'This does not concern you. Step away from your keyboard. Go outside and see how big the world is. Namasté.'
#4 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 6:25 AM EDTWhats next....Chop Sticks, Prayer Rugs, Turbins and Yak Burgers at MacAkmed's? The north woods of Maine are looking better eveyday.
#5 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 8:51 AM EDTMy only problem is that Cyrillic had to be explained in the article...
#6 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 9:44 AM EDTso.. what's Al Gore think of this altering of his invention ?
Personally, i think its a good thing. if i want to find something, i will... no matter the alphabet.
#7 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:05 AM EDTDo you think that a translater will be developed?
#8 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:17 AM EDTNo problem. Most websites are localized, so now the URL can be localized as well. Windows is using the Unicode font and with Windows 7 you can change the OS language on the fly.
So, you will have more than one URL pointing to the same IP and some of those URLs will use characters beyon the ASCII 128. What's the big deal?
#9 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:23 AM EDTI'm still waiting for IPv6 to go fully active, then I can check my refrigerator contents without getting off my butt!
#10 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:11 PM EDTSo, who decides whose language is 'important enough' to add into the mix? Will we be adding every character of every language on the planet? How many characters of each language? Will the automated translation scripting hold up under that kind of pounding? If they think it's only going to be a couple hundred characters, it will be amusing to say the least.
Take Japanese, for instance. They have no less than four written languages - Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romaji (roman characters). Kanji has somewhere around 50,000 characters, 1900 which are most commonly used. There are 46 each of Hiragana and Katakana, and the Romaji set is comprised (naturally) of the 26 regular alphabetical characters currently used in domain names. Going with the smaller number, we're talking about adding almost 2,000 characters to the mix, over 50,000 if we take the high number. It's not like we can exclude Japan's request of handling their characters; Japan is a prime user/pioneer of technology and has a population last ranked 10th in the world at 127 million people in 2008 (from Japan's Statistics Bureau) - they have plenty of websites and traffic.
The good thing is that Japan has had no problem adopting the Roman character set when they have 50,000 reasons why they should not.
One other consideration (as a parent) - I will now be unable to even see if http://発電機.com.jp (kanji) really means http://generator.com.jp, or does it actually mean http://wildsexorgy.jp.com? You can't tell until you actually go to the site. Welcome to a new age of spyware and hacksites....
#11 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:13 PM EDTEver heard of the Unicode charset? It's meant to address pretty much the same issue, and it's widely supported these days. If you can map from a huge range of possible characters to a sequence of bits, it's not hard to imagine how to map that same range of characters to some ASCII (which only includes a-z, A-Z without accents) sequence.
As for your concern that some random string of unrecognizable characters would redirect to some offensive site, that problem exists right now. whitehouse.com used be a porn site, but you wouldn't know that from looking at the address. Addresses are never going to be a good mechanism for trust or identifying what the website is actually about. The best resource you have are search engines, which will obviously go beyond matching addresses.
So, who decides whose language is 'important enough' to add into the mix? Will we be adding every character of every language on the planet? How many characters of each language? Will the automated translation scripting hold up under that kind of pounding? If they think it's only going to be a couple hundred characters, it will be amusing to say the least.
Take Japanese, for instance. They have no less than four written languages - Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, and Romaji (roman characters). Kanji has somewhere around 50,000 characters, 1900 which are most commonly used. There are 46 each of Hiragana and Katakana, and the Romaji set is comprised (naturally) of the 26 regular alphabetical characters currently used in domain names. Going with the smaller number, we're talking about adding almost 2,000 characters to the mix, over 50,000 if we take the high number. It's not like we can exclude Japan's request of handling their characters; Japan is a prime user/pioneer of technology and has a population last ranked 10th in the world at 127 million people in 2008 (from Japan's Statistics Bureau) - they have plenty of websites and traffic.
The good thing is that Japan has had no problem adopting the Roman character set when they have 50,000 reasons why they should not.
One other consideration (as a parent) - I will now be unable to even see if http://発電機.com.jp (kanji) really means http://generator.com.jp, or does it actually mean http://wildsexorgy.jp.com? You can't tell until you actually go to the site. Welcome to a new age of spyware and hacksites....
#12 - Tue Oct 27, 2009 11:15 PM EDTYou're in Easy Mode. If you prefer, you can use XHTML Mode instead. |
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