And, to be negative, a new era of domain scams ;-)

"in any language or script."

Except Klingon.

If I'm not mistaken:
1) Isn't this old news? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10100108
2) The "owner" of a script still has to take some initiative. So for example Armenia will have to take some steps before we can use Armenian in domain names.

And I hope this doesn't cause minority-script people to avoid the rest of the web...

hhp

Hrant: on 1), well, no. dot-com written in Arabic or Cyrillic scripts is still "dot-com" (or perhaps "dot-kom"). This new proposal is for the stuff after the final dot, so a better example would have been

www.hey-its-even-slower-than-it-was.typophile

(But that'll set you back about $130,000.)

?
According to that article from May of 2010
مصر.
has since been a valid TLD for Egypt for example. Bogus?

hhp

Andreas, what is the Unicode number for that T-like character in the box (in the url)? I didn't know Typophile has its own Unicode point :)

> مصر.

Wow! Ah, RTL. Just got my brain in a knot.
Question: Can one mix scripts in one URL
(like «typophile.[Arabic Egyptian TLD]»?
If so then how does that work for combining
LTR and RTL scripts? It changes the whole
logic of which side of a dot which parts are on.

Hrant: this reads "msr" in Arabic, which I presume is the 3-letter abbrev. for "Miṣr" -- the native name for Egypt. So this top level domain still complies to the old system ".uk", ".de", ".nl" and so on.

The new system allows any top level domain (any one if you pay for it, that is).

what is the Unicode number for that T-like character in the box

1F143

1F143

SQUARED LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T

It resembles the italian sign for tobacconist ;-)

Actually "msr" in Arabic is the full spelling. :-)

But [I think] I understand the point now.

hhp