Non-Ascii URL

Although the support for this has been around for quite a while, I've rarely come across the sites non-Latin based languages having non-ASCII based URLs or IDN. Part of the reason for this are spoofing concerns such as the Cyrillic "а" looking a lot like the Latin "a" and misleading people since they look so identical, resulting on it not supported or enabled by default.

Anyways, on my main blog in Japanese, you would notice that the URL is
http://虹を追いかけて.blogspot.com/
in Webkit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome), but due to reasons mentioned in the previous paragraph, or in browsers that don't support it, you are most likely to see
http://xn--n8jos8fqkx000ci6n.blogspot.com/
instead.

"But how did you get the name there as the actual domain?" is what you're probably asking. If you want anything after ccTLD it uses code that's completely different from the above like
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%99%B9%E3%82%92%E8%BF%BD%E3%81%84%E3%81%8B%E3%81%91%E3%81%A6
for
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/虹を追いかけて
you might see when hovering over a link in eg. Firefox (of course, that article in question does not exist) and it's obviously longer, but that's not what I'm talking about here.

As you might know, entering the non-ASCII URLs is simple:

Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.6:

Enter the URL you want and hit enter. If you are using IE8, the converted URL might appear for only a second before redirecting to your default search engine.

Enter the URL you want and hit enter. If you are using IE8, the converted URL might appear for only a second before redirecting to your default search engine.

You should see this or an error message below with that same url. "www." might be automatically added.

In IE8, you can check both the native and encoded addresses and even what type of characters were used.

Chrome:

The encoded URL would appear just as you type it.

Yes, it's that simple for Chrome. Anyways, copy that encoded URL, edit out unwanted parts (if necessary), register it, and you're done!

I would like to see this take off, but I don't want people using Cyrillic characters to mislead others into thinking they are the look-alike Latin characters. Also, can we hide "http://"? The person who invented it didn't want that to appear too. "www." is also redundant and a mouthful to say out.

Google begins dropping support for Internet Explorer 6

In a move to help get users off Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 browser, and onto one that's much better with current web standards, Google has announced that soon it will begin dropping support for the outdated software.

The problem with Internet Explorer 6 is that it fails at running some of the standard features of today's web development
technologies, meaning that it gives web developers a rather hard time when they put websites together. If the market share were small, this wouldn't matter so much, but Internet Explorer 6 still holds a decent-sized portion compared to other browsers, due to companies and other organizations refusing to switch from it. Despite the fact that there are many faster, more secure, and generally better browsers, such as Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, Safari and Firefox, a lot of companies have yet to make the upgrade.

The announcement made on the Google Enterprise Blog states that beginning 1st March, Google Docs and Google Sites will no longer work correctly when viewed in Internet Explorer 6. These two services have a lot of users, so hopefully, this will help make a difference when it comes to what browsers are being used. Keep in mind that the company is only starting with those two; support for Internet Explorer 6 will be phased out as time progresses, giving users some time to switch. The announcement closed with, "2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps and we want to ensure that everyone can make the most of what we are developing. Please take the time to switch your organization to the most up-to-date browsers available."