That is how Internationalized Domain Names (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_nam

That is how Internationalized Domain Names (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name) are encoded by the browser and/or OS to get around the fact that a lot of legacy systems assumed only ASCII characters would ever be used. There's RFCs that cover this which have been around for a number of years. Today is hardly the first day these have been live. (Correction: Doing this for the TLD is new.) On Twitter, various URL shorteners have started becoming popular which are using non-ASCII characters in the domain names. Related: I recently put together a package for iPhone developers that adds some support for IDN to NSURL (this code will be deployed in the next update of Twitterrific for iPad). http://files.iconfactory.net/sean/NSURL+IFUnicodeURL/ http://files.iconfactory.net/sean/NSURL+IFUnicodeURL/