I remember a few year ago register.com was offering registartion for domains with non-english characters. So, you could get a domain with a german letter, such as that german "o" with two dots above it.

Now I can't that anymore. Anyknow know what happend to it?

Any news if there will be domains available with german, french, spanish, polish, greek characters any time soon?

Seeing IDN (Internationalised Domain Names) only went live about a year ago I don't understand how Register.com could have been offering them several years ago. If they were offering something with non-ASCII characters it was probably their own system which wasn't compatible with anything else. (I believe .nu had such a system for a while).

IDNs are now available for most character sets, and are offered by quite a few ccTLD registries. IDN is THE international standard. I don't know what the current situation is with IDN GTLD domains, but can probably find out.

So you're saying it's now possible ro register domain names with non-english characters? If so, where can I register such a domain?

Enom also support IDN domains. http://www.enom.com/domains/idn.asp

For more information contact Enom.

In the Czech republic, for example, the possibility to register such domains (with Czech characters) was promised, but postponed recently due to some technical problems and incompatibilities.

In Norway we can register names with the norwegian letters æ ø and å since early 2004 I think :) Any biz in your country should be able to let you reg domains with the specific non english chars used in your country..if you're using a national registrant that is :)

Well, I live in the Unites States and would like to register a domain with polish characters.

I went to that enom site but when I typed a polish letter enom just changed the letter to "7--aa" or "34bb" or something else. Then I went to the shopping cart and the domain was displayed correctly with the polish letter.

It is a little deceiving though. For example I want to register szkola.com (where the "l" is a polish letter. In the enom panel this is what it says:

Native: szkola.com
encode: xn--szkoa-n7a.com

So, the "real" domain I'm actually registering is "xn--szkoa-n7a.com" and enom is just pointing requests for szkola.com to xn--szkoa-n7a.com?

What if another registrar also takes szkola.com but some some other encoding on it?

Basically I am asking how reliable it is and if it's just another system that might die in a few years like easyspace and their .peace, .kids, ,.shop domain extensions.

There must be a standard encoding format for domain registrations. Contact Enom support, they will let you know exactly what is happening.

There IS a standard format.

Ok, thank you for your help. I'll contact enom for more info.