Non latin character sets in domain names, Millenium Bug 2.0?

Question

I understand the cultural diversity motivation behind this ICAN decision but how disruptive is the change going to be?

How many routers will choke on non latin characters in URLs?

And what about the millions of lines of business application code handling email fields?

Answer 1

I don't think you need to worry about routers. They route packets between IP addresses, not DNS names. And the millions of lines of business logic will still be able to handle Latin characters, they're not going to break overnight. That's because the data entry fields for email names should already be filtering out non-Latin stuff (if it's not, they deserve everything they get).

Granted, they may need changes to allow non-Latin URLs to be entered but that's a management issue and vastly different to Y2K, where applications were expected to stop working.

Aside: most Y2K (financial) applications were fixed well in advance simply because they work with dates multiple years into the future anyway. For all the money a major telco spent on Y2K, we found one problem and that was a web page listing the date as Jan 1, 19100 (because some clown didn't realize that a tm_year was number of years since 1900, not just the last two digits of the year).

I suspect this issue will have even less impact than Y2K.

Answer 2

I wouldn't worry much about the email thing yet... Most email services don't stick to email address specs anyways. For example, "This is me"@[10.11.12.13] is a valid email address according to the standard. Its another thing that people don't actually use this format. Similarly, non-latin chars won't be a problem till people actually start using them - and that may take some time.

Routers won't choke, like paxdiablo mentioned, Probably DNS servers won't either. But things like proxy servers just might fail initally, atleast till websites actually start using them.

But the main problem I feel is with usability. How do users who don't have non-latin characters on their keyboard type in the address correctly? They might not be interested in adding a new keyboard layout (via software of course) just to type in a URL. Also, with asian languages and all, its quite hard getting the characters right for people who don't know that language - with complex glyphs and all. So the only alternative, according to me, atleast for now, would be that there are latin alternatives or aliases to all these domain names and email addresses.