IDN : Java Glossary

Internationalised Domain Name. Website domains can now be specified in languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet. These include Chinese, Thai, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew.

An international URL link is encoded on a web with the Roman alphabet like this: http://xn--fdbk5d8ap9b8a8d.xn--deba0ad/ and it displays in the alphabet of the particular language, in this case Hebrew. The text of the link can be in any language and say anything. If you click the link above, your browser may understand it, and display it for you in Hebrew. Opera and Firefox works and echos the URL in Hebrew. Safari echoes in in both forms. Sea Monkey, Flock and IE all work, but echo the URL as gibberish hex peppered with percent signs.

Learning More

Sun’s Javadoc on IDN class : available:

on the web at java.sun.com
in the current JDK 1.6.0_17 or in the old JDK 1.5.0_22 on your local Windows J: drive.

domain name
IDN examples
RFC 3490: defines IDN encoding of international names
URL
url-encoded

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