IDN : Java Glossary

IDN

IDN (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 (Uniform Resource Locator) 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 it in both forms. SeaMonkey, Flock and IE (Internet Explorer) all work, but echo the URL as gibberish hex peppered with percent signs.

Learning More

Oracle’s Javadoc on IDN class : available:

on the web at Oracle.com
in the current JDK 1.7.0_02 or in the old JDK 1.6.0_30 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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