First published: 20th April 2011
Since 22 February 2011, the Hong Kong Domain Name Registration Company Limited (HKDNR) has been accepting registrations of .香港 domain names. During the initial Pre-Launch Priority Registration period, up to 10 March, HKDNR accepted applications from existing .hk domain name holders. The successfully-registered domain names became active on 23 March 2011. Now that the pre-launch priority registration period is over, Chinese domain names can be registered on a first-come-first-served basis.
As an existing .hk domain name holder, Yui Kee took the opportunity to register Chinese equivalents of its domain names. We have since completed the provision of our websites under the new domains. Therefore, you can now visit our sites at:
The content on these sites is exactly the same as the English equivalent domain names. The only difference is that, for the Chinese domain names, if the user's browser does not have a language preference configured, and there are English and Chinese versions of the page requested, the Chinese page will be served. The English domain names default to serving the English page. Of course, we would recommend users to set their preferred language in their browser.
Technical Considerations
Internet engineers will know that the current domain name system only supports ASCII characters, but a clever trick has been used to implement additional characters without requiring every company and every user on the internet to upgrade their software on the same day. The Internationalized Domain Name system encodes these non-ASCII characters as ASCII characters using Punycode. When a section of a domain name contains a non-ASCII character, the Punycode form starts with the four characters xn--, so the website addresses above can also be written:
- http://xn--7dv288b.xn--3jst58k.xn--55qx5d.xn--j6w193g/
- http://xn--zf0a.xn--3jst58k.xn--55qx5d.xn--j6w193g/
Punycode covers non-Chinese characters too, such as ü and other accented European characters, Cyrillic, and the Japanese character sets. HKDNR provides a useful Punycode converter.
Punycode is useful because you do not need the correct fonts or up-to-date software to access internationalized domain names, the Punycode form can always be used. A recent browser, such as Firefox 3.6, will automatically convert the entered Punycode domain name to the native language characters. An older browser, such as Internet Explorer 6, will show the Punycode. The minor disadvantages of Punycode are that the code is not memorable, and if a native-language URL is printed, it is practically impossible for a foreigner to enter the URL.
Some useful hints when implementing internationalized domain names:
Your webserver can be configured to default to different languages for different virtual sites. For Apache, if your directory hierarchy follows the domain names, changing all your .香港 sites to default to Chinese could be as simple as adding this to your configuration file:
<Directory "/var/sites/xn--j6w193g">
LanguagePriority zh-tw zh-cn en fr de it ja
</Directory>
Your wordprocessor or editor's autocorrect may not be your friend, it can mangle your punycode names. For example, Word's dictionary will recommend "an" as the correct spelling of "xn". Word's "AutoFormat as you type" will replace "--" with "—", and the difference can be very hard to see in some fonts. There are at least two Word features to switch off: AutoCorrect: Replace text as you type; AutoFormat as you type: Symbol characters (--) with (—); and starting a spell check is obviously something to avoid.
Whether or not internationalised domain names will open up the internet to billions of users that are unfamiliar with the Latin character set or cause problems by Balkanising the internet is debatable, but we can definitely expect to see a lot more of them in future.