yesterday i implemented something really pretty awesome over at antville.org: international domain names!*

שלום.antville.org سلام.antville.org

(i hope the spellings are ok.)

thanks to punycode and java 6’s built-in java.net.IDN class it was almost too easy.

this way, even (most) special characters do not bother anymore:

te§t.antville.org ♡.antville.org

of course, there are still some details to be worked out – e.g. i have no idea yet why kaˈtʃɨɲski] does not behave** – and it could be that we still will bump into some even nastier bug.

however, it is a feature i have not seen so far at other site hosting services, have you?

* well, to be precise it should be international host names but that does not spoil the fun. ** also antville’s current rendering algorithms may rain on the parade: simply putting the idn’s unicode url here results in incorrectly rendered output, that is why i have to use the punycode url inside a manually entered html link element.