DNS adds IDN TLD support
We’ve enabled full IDN TLD support within Zerigo DNS. If you’re not well-versed in DNS-related acronym soup, you’re in good company. So, let’s explain.
The DNS system was built around a basic set of characters, primarily alphanumeric, with a couple symbols thrown in. For English speakers, this is perfectly adequate. For speakers of other latin-based languages, it may not be quite ideal, but it’s not too bad since the alphabets are similar.
However, speakers of other alphabets and languages have found things to not fit so well. With that in mind, the powers that be began to work on on a solution quite some time ago.
Several years ago, they brought us the Internationalized Domain Names, or IDN. This is a way of encoding any Unicode character into something that fits the existing DNS system using a process called punycode. You can recognize an IDN domain name because it starts with “xn--”, for example: xn--hxajbheg2az3al.com.
Zerigo has supported these all along. However, notice the .com on the end. That’s the TLD (top level domain) and it’s still in a latin character set. The next step in the IDN process is to make it possible for those to be in native languages too.
That brings us to today. Starting in May, ICANN formally launched a handful of IDN TLDs. They’ve added a couple more since May too. Appropriate registries in the countries that have been assigned IDN TLDs are just now in the process of making IDN TLD domain registrations available.
The new TLDs also use punycode. For example, Russia’s new IDN TLD is .xn--p1ai (which is the two cyrillic letters for RF, Russian Federation).
We’re pleased to support all of the TLDs that ICANN has approved as of today. For the IDN TLDs that are issuing domains now, you can use those domains with Zerigo today. For the IDN TLDs that have been approved but domain registrations are still pending, we have everything ready.
Currently supported IDN TLDs are for China, Egypt, Hong Kong, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and United Arab Emirates (list).
Using our example above, a full IDN domain in our system might look like:
xn--e1afmkfd.xn--p1ai.
ICANN will be assigning more of these TLDs in the coming months and we’ll be adding them to our system too.
As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.