Impact of IDNs on web developers?

So, the BBC just released the story that ICANN is going to approve non-latin scripts for use in domain names (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8333194.stm).

I'm wondering what i开发者_JAVA技巧nfluence this will have on us web developers. Are we going to see errors when we're grabbing referral urls, or large numbers of unicode issues when creating links on a webpage? Does anyone know how IDNs are being implemented?

I would guess that platforms with somewhat patchy unicode support, like PHP, will be more affected than others.

Cheers

I imagine that it will be using Punycode, as specified in RFC3492. This should mean that current systems will continue to work just fine, but will not correctly display the non-latin characters.

For example, from the Wikipedia page, the URL http://tūdaliņ.lv/ can currently be encoded as http://xn--tdali-d8a8w.lv/ Systems which recognise this as non-Latin script have the option of displaying it with the non-Latin characters; systems which are not aware of this continue to be able to use it as a standard, if odd-looking hostname. The recent proposal is to extend this use to the top-level domain names.

Yes. This will make spoofing attacks a WHOLE lot easier (various encoded characters look nearly identical to the western ones). Filtering is going to be a pain. Some registries have stated that they will NOT support IDN (apparently .be and a few others), so it won't be universal. It's also not even clear if we're using UTF-8 or punycode or perhaps both (also depending upon which domain registrar you are dealing with, etc.). All in all it's going to be a gigantic mess, but not much more than the current one we live in.

It's been live for some years here in Korea, using what I presume is the same technology. Takeup seems to be very slow indeed so I think there will be time to fix problems as they arise (and there haven't been many).