Dyn fully supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) as defined in RFC 5890. Below is an overview of IDN terminology, as well as formatting for the Dyn system.
Terminology
ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange, are the characters you are reading now. Default for computer science, and highly Latin script centric.
Punycode = a way to represent Unicode with the limited character subset of ASCII supported by the Domain Name System. For example, “München” (German name for the city of Munich) would be encoded as “Mnchen-3ya. See RFC 3492 for more information.
i18n = shorthand for “internationalization”. Named for the 18 characters between “I” and “n”.
IDN = International Domain Name. This is when the domain name is written in local languages like .삼성 to represent Samsung’s branded Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD). This can be used for any web ready script language that has punycode support. Most major languages support this formatting, and there are punycode translators available online.
How It Works
IDNs are represented per label, which means for www.example.com, there are three opportunities to be internationalized: www, example, and com. Dyn is able to support internationalization at each level, so you can have a television.삼성 (television.samsung) as well as a 텔레비전.samsung (television.samsung).
Punycode is enabled as soon as a single non-ASCII character is shown within the label. This converts the values into a hash, represented in ASCII with an extension to inform the interpreter that this is not an actual label with the same value as the hash.
This converts our 삼성 (samsung) into “xn--cg4bki”, which can be entered like any other zone or node to DNS. This would then be entered into Dyn just as normal, like xn--cg4bki.com to create 삼성.com. Because we support this at all label levels, you can do this at each label setting. Our 텔레비전.삼성 (television.samsung) can become xn--om2b27i73inuj.xn--cg4bki as follows:
- The first label 텔레비전 (television) becomes xn--om2b27i73inuj
- The second label 삼성 (samsung) becomes xn--cg4bki
- Therefore, 텔레비전.삼성 (television.samsung) becomes xn--om2b27i73inuj.xn--cg4bki
Dyn Support
Dyn is very supportive of IDNs. On our TLD platform, we can support punycode TLDs. On our authoritative platform, they can be added like any other zone, as long as you use the punycode address as the zone name, or label name if it is a subdomain.