Proper Spanish, coming to a URL near you

[DavyBUK]

Spanish speakers have gotten used to seeing their language take a beating when it comes to URLs, since such common accents and even an entire letter -- the beloved Ñ -- have previously been unavailable for use in our browser address bar. Given the constraint, concessions have been made over the years, or people have simply had to call their website something else so as not to risk embarassment in the form of words like year becoming anus. But that's all going to change now, as the Spanish government has labored to get the standards changed to accommodate the proper use of the language on URLs, as well as the characters associated with the other languages of Spain (Catalan, Valencian, Euskera and Galician):
Red.es, the industry in charge of domain registry in Spain, has informed the 62 accredited registry agents to allow names with the the characters 'á', 'à', 'é', 'è', 'í', 'ï' 'ó', 'ò', 'ú', 'ü', 'ñ', 'ç' y 'l.l'.

The initiative will go into effect in October, and there's already worry of speculation. As with prime real estate, there are just thousands of people out there waiting to snatch up previously unregistered URLs. Imagine the value of a site called "niños.com" (which when you type into a browser now, redirects to http://xn--nios-hqa.com/) to a baby products company, or "elpaís.com" to newspaper El País (previously found at elpais.com -- without the accent on the "i").

With so much at stake, they've set up a way to make sure vultures don't swoop down and take all the prime domain names. Priority will be given to holders of URLs already registered with the .es extension (for Spain) to register for the proper spelling or punctuation of their name, and a live auction will be held online in the case of disputed URLs, according to Spain's El País (or El Pais).

El País seems to imply that this only applies to sites in Spain. What isn't clear to me is where this leaves domain holders who don't have the .es extension for their sites. Will this apply to people with sites ending in .com or .com.mx, for instance? This measure is needed not only in Spain but in the rest of the Spanish-speaking world.

http://vivirlatino.com/2007/06/07/pr...l-near-you.php

[Rubber Duck]

IDN speculators effectively locked out.

[Drewbert]

Well, the original El País article seems to be correct to me, aside from the possible mistake of including "ll" in the extra letters - not sure if that is the case. If they were to do that, they might also include the "ch" character as well.

The guy writing the vivirlatino article obviously gets himself a little confused, saying "Imagine the value of a site called "niños.com" (which when you type into a browser now, redirects to http://xn--nios-hqa.com/) to a baby products company". Yes, I'm sure Laura Snow agrees!

Ah. Here's some info direct from red.es...

http://www.mityc.es/es-ES/Servicios/...ltilinguis.htm

They give the mystery extra as "l•l (l geminada del catalán)" = "twinned L". I think whoever generated that sentence didn't do it in UTF8 and when it converted over for the website, it screwed up.

On further investigation, the Unicode character they're referring to is ŀ = "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE DOT" = Catalan legacy compatibility character for ISO 6937