ICANN today approved the first top-level Chinese language domain names: .中国 and .中國 for China; .台灣 and .台湾 for Taiwan; and .香港 for Hong Kong (China and Taiwan get two each because of Simplified and Traditional Chinese – whereas the characters for Hong Kong are the same in both).
This opens the door for domain names entirely in Chinese, which should at some level better serve the 20% of the world’s population that speaks the language. Currently, many Chinese specific websites can be found / entered using Chinese characters in a browser’s navigation bar, but the top level domains were still, up until today, exclusively in Romanized letters.
In China, although the country has .cn and .com.cn domains already (as well as .org.cn, .net.cn and provincial-level domains), .com is still the preferred top-level domain. Whether this will change with the introduction of fully Chinese domain names is yet to be seen. One disadvantage of course is that non-Chinese speakers will have a harder time finding the website, so it works both ways to an extent (there are people that are interested in Chinese sites that don’t necessarily read Chinese, but not that many probably).
Regardless, this is an overdue and welcome move, though it will be interesting to see in Mainland China how restrictive it will be to register these domains in the wake of last year’s tightening on .cn domain registration rules.
Would be interesting to see how people from outside those areas can access them unless they go to the trouble of getting the Chinese lettering on their systems. Then figuring out what keys to press to get those symbols. Might prove awkward unless they allow the .cn address to transfer over to it automatically.
To type these characters a chinese person would have to type in .zhongguo on their keyboards (there is no such thing as a chinese keyboard, chinese people type in pinyin). That’s 8 keystrokes instead of the 2 you need for .cn. Seems to miss the point about as much as the .mobi top-level domain did.
Oh wow, that is just too cool.
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http://www.web-anonymity.mx.tc
if you have any half decent chinese input software .中国 only requires 3 key strokes ‘.’ then ‘z’ then ‘g’.
This is because alot of pinyin input software (eg google pinyin) allows you to enter chinese words without tying the full pinyin representation of the characters, for example I could type 你今天怎么样 in just 6 key strokes – “njzmy”. With this method you just type the first letter from each pinyin word, the software figures it all out.
In comparison with English, the same sentence would require 23 key strokes – “how are you doing today”.
Note: In response to a comment I saw on Digg, made one clarification in paragraph 3 regarding people searching for these sites that don’t read/write Chinese
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thanks for reading!
Chinese is not a language morons
Wow, this is pretty cool.