Coming in 2009: Yourname@somewhere.中国
The era of online domination by the Roman alphabet will come one step closer to its end next year when a new top-level domain for China, .中国, is deployed. Xinhua reports that ICANN expects the domain, which uses the two-character modern Chinese word for "China," will be ready in 2009.
The report also notes that people will be able to use Chinese characters for their mailbox name (the part before the @ sign) as well.
In the future, Internet users (will be able to) use their native languages as mailbox names to send and receive e-mail, which means (the) English-dominant (Roman characters only) era which began in 1982 is about to end.
I hope the encodings will be flexible enough to communicate across deployments of Chinese characters. If someone writes a name in simplified characters and then someone whose computer can only type traditional needs to write an e-mail, this could get challenging.
Formerly a journalist and consultant in Beijing, Graham Webster is a graduate student studying East Asia at Harvard University. At Sinobyte, he follows the effects of technology on Chinese politics, the environment, and global affairs. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Normal people like me would have difficulty just typing in the address, not to mention conquering the security on the actual page. =p
so this is far-out, man
how do you type that?
Pinyin is used for helping one to learn Chinese, more specifically, pronounciation. Pinyin is never used for any form of publication and communication.
I wish the implementation wil be flexible enough for rare Chinese language users to read Chinese or the default language of their device, means automatic translation if the Chinese characters cannot be displayed, not the codes that literally no one can read.
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by naip
October 21, 2008 11:45 AM PDT
- It won't be that bad. The DNS System has already moved to unicode
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