Everyone was rushing to get one of those bq--abcde.com multilingual domain names when they were first released couple months ago. But what now? Nobody can use it yet. And nobody hears any news about them. Does anyone have any idea?

bq--abcde ???????????????????????

pls. explain

The third phase of the "testbed" process, that dealing with resolving multilevel domain names to IP numbers, is still going on. I haven't seen any firm timeline for its completion.

Astra4, in the DNS zone files (and therefore in whois listings and such) multilanguage domain names will appear as encoded ASCII strings. In the current protocol, they begin with "bq--". So a particular Chinese-language domain, for example, might be encoded as bq--u88wfe2se.com.

[Edited by JayC on 01-02-2001 at 12:08 PM]

Ah - I see. Here's one that seems to work.

http://www.bq--2voa.net

Yea, the domain bq--2voa.net itself would work if you type it in alpha-numeric form, coz basically it has no difference from normal domain. But the purpose of multilingual domains are for typing different languages as the domain name that brings you to the alpha-numeric domain.

For example,
Type "#some#korean#words#.com" and you should be linked to bq--2voa.net



JayC, as you said
In the current protocol, they begin with "bq--".
I hope they are not gonna change the protocol that uses something other than "bq--" !! :)

Exactly as Pippen said, the idea is that you would be able use an appropriate extended character set -- say Korean, Chinese, Japanese, whatever -- and the DNS would resolve it that way. Sure, you can just use the ASCII-converted version, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of making the system language- and character-neutral (well, neutral as long as you're using one of the supported character sets. I think there are four so far).

I don't know why they chose bq-- specifically, but really what matters is that it's a string that's not normally been allowed in a domain name.

[Edited by JayC on 01-03-2001 at 03:17 AM]

is the bq- for all languages? or will there be different prefix for each language?

Originally posted by Wazeh
is the bq- for all languages? or will there be different prefix for each language? I believe the setup is to use only one prefix and for a separate encoding type element to be stored in the registry database, that will indicate which character set the translation will be made into and from.

By the way, it's bq-- (two hyphens, not one).