3 ms·

Unicode domain names could be implemented with a one way hash function with ascii output. That would solve the length problem. Depending on the hash algorithm

Unicode domain names could be implemented with a one way hash function with ascii output. That would solve the length problem. Depending on the hash algorithm, collisions would be extremely rare, and i doubt many domain names are already registered that are equivalent to the output of most hashes. I guess it would be similar in a way to tinyurl.com This obviously would only be a good option if the hash didn't need to be reversible. And I don't really see why it would be, since the dns system itself isn't perfectly reversible.

pmjordan 19y ago
Adding a second mechanism is just not going to work at all, I'm afraid. How would the application know which encoding you're trying to use? There's also no clean way to solve the reverse DNS issue with hashes. Besides, it took long enough to get IDNs out "into the wild", and they're still struggling. IE6 still doesn't support them out-of-the-box, so there goes about half (or more) of your non-technical audience. I use exactly one site with an IDN regularly, http://öbb.at/ http://öbb.at/ - the rail company here, and they actually advertise their other, non-IDN domain, oebb.at, presumably due to lack of browser support.