IDN Talk

Making an IDN based dot jp site - Repost

Written on March 26th, 2006 in IDN Market by Olney

As I launched my first Japanese IDN site with a .jp extension I started to realize a bit of a difference between using an IDN with a dot com extension & a dot jp.

Japan Registry reminds me of Network Solutions of years back when I started to buy domains for my online projects. You bought the domain but it took about a day for the whois to update. I see many posting dot jps IDN Domains directly after they purchase them. Currently we don’t even know if the domain sites registering jp domains are in realtime because after the purchase if you check immediately afterwards on several domain sites the domain is sometime still shown as being available.

When adding a domain to your server you must still add the domain as punycode. When you change over the nameserver that also can take a day to transfer over.

The best part of using the dot jp was in firefox if you type in a dot com IDN Domain it will resolve to the punycode. With the IDN dot jps Firefox never resolves to the punycode. It stays as a native Japanese term in the browser.

The site I made is an online tutorial, currently I’m promoting it within a popular Japanese social network so I can see the direct feedback & comments. Mac users can use IDN Domains already so this is the best way to get feedback on what young Japanese think. So far what I’ve never heard from a single Japanese person here in Japan is “why do need IDN Domains” or “we can’t use those”. 100% of the people I’ve informed that they can use them thought that they are better than using English Domains for Japanese. This also isn’t media hype.. It’s a fact.