Plenty of Japanese-language domain names may be up for grabs this spring. (Upfront).[CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a set of codes used to represent letters, numbers, a few symbols, and control characters. Originally designed for teletype operations, it has found wide application in computers. ].com IF YOU MISSED OUT on getting a Japanese language Japanese language Language spoken by about 125 million people on the islands of Japan, including the Ryukyus. The only other language of the Japanese archipelago is Ainu (see Ainu), now spoken by only a handful of people on Hokkaido, though once much more widespread. domain name back in 2000, your second chance may be coming up. VeriSigu of the US announced at the beginning of this year that its Internationalized Domain Names An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many European languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or (IDNs) service is functional, meaning that you can now write and register domain names with .com, .net, or .org extensions in characters and symbols from over 350 languages, including Japanese. Perhaps you'd like to have a name like http://www.[CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com for your very own. Yeah, you and the rest of the world. VeriSigu began accepting registrations for its Multilingual mul·ti·lin·gual adj. 1. Of, including, or expressed in several languages: a multilingual dictionary. 2. Domain Names Testhed back in November 2000. Coming at the tail end of the Internet boom, most of the "good" names, as well as plenty of the unmarketable ones, were snapped up in a speculation frenzy. Now that the Internet bubble See dot-com bubble. has burst, it's quite possible that many of those domain names were not renewed before March 9, when VeriSign stopped offering its free extension, and you might be able to get the Japanese language domain name you wanted but missed out on the first time around. But be warned: There are some problems with the names. First, there are no guarantees. VeriSign goes to lengths to remind people that this is just a test bed. Second, email with non-English characters doesn't work. "The domain name service," VeriSigu says, "is separate from email, and, unfortunately, the systems that handle email are not able to recognize or support non-English language characters at this time." Third, Japan's three alphabets increase the chance of domain name confusion. [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com, [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com and [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com are all different domain names and should in no case be confused with [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com nor [CHINESE CHARACTER NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].com These problems could lead even the most ardent (Ardent Software, Inc., Westboro, MA) A database vendor formed in 1998 as the merger of VMARK Software, Unidata and O2 Technology. Its products included the UniVerse and UniData databases and DataStage data warehouse utility. early adapter A device that allows one system to connect to and work with another. An adapter is often a simple circuit that converts one set of signals to another; however, the term often refers to devices which are more accurately called "controllers. to conclude that internationalized domain names are more trouble than they are worth. |
|
||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion