Hi Simon,
On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 10:49 AM, Simon Lyall
Well I was a little disappointed .nz only supported some Maori characters, having accents would have been useful.
True enough.
But in reality having domains that people have trouble typing isn't very useful. I just tried typing "cafe" with an accent and the combination or terminals I'm using rejected it. The average person has problems with backslash and forward-slash, imaging talking them through typing a domain name with a macron or accent in it.
I disagree. While currently this may not be straightforward for a lot of people, we have to start somewhere. The point of getting this enabled for .nz is that we can start down the path of enabling wider application support. Chicken and egg problem, really. Nobody will bother turning this stuff on if they have no reason to use it. Typing the characters is not straightforward on standard US kbd/lanaguage type setups commonly in use here, but it's trivial at least on OSX and likely the other common OSes to change the kbd/language to allow the macrons to be typed with a simple modifier key. The people this is targeted at generally do know how to use them, they do have the keys enabled, and they do want to use it (though maybe that is impractical at the present time due to application support lacking). We CAN enable the options in our software to support unicode, so I think it's a little pathetic to say "Oh, I haven't got it turned on, therefore nobody else could possibly want to use this ever". I'm not expecting this to be usable by everyone overnight, and I'm not really expecting to see tv and newspaper ads with macron-enabled domains appearing, but it's nice to be able to have it there. It's certainly a nice step towards acceptance that English really isn't the only language in use in NZ right now, and I think that makes us look good internationally. Sure it take a bit of work to get this enabled, but I really don't see what all the resistance is about. If it's a question of no demand, then that is fine, we do have a couple of registrars already which people can use, which is great. But I am curious to know a bit more definitely what the reasoning behind not implementing IDN support would be for registrars? Maybe we can revisit this all again in another few years when the application support is a bit more developed. :) Cheers, Blair