FAQs: Multilingual Domain Registration (IDN)
Question: What is a multilingual domain?
Answer: It is a domain that includes accents and common characters of languages derived from Latin (Spanish, Catalan, Galician, French, etc.) or also other languages such as Greek or Cyrillic. Examples of special characters are à, á, è, é, í, ï, ò, ó,ô ú, ü, ñ, ç, l·l.
Q: What does IDN mean?
A: IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) is the acronym that stands for Internationalized Domain Name. It is the standard used by all registrars to allow encoding of international characters in the DNS, thus making domains with special characters available.
Q: Can domains with special characters be registered at cdmon? A: Currently at cdmon you can register IDN domains. To register one, you can go to the domain registration page and perform an availability search.
Q: Is there any difference between IDNs of different extensions? A: Yes, .cat IDNs are different from the rest. To have a .cat IDN, you must have the homonymous domain without the special character, and then the IDN is added as a variant. That is, to have catalán.cat you must have registered the domain catalan.cat. In that case, catalán.cat with an accent is a variant of catalan.cat without an accent. The advantage is that for the price of a normal .cat, you also get the IDN variant. For the rest of IDN extensions, they are independent domains from the homonymous one. This means that cdmón.es and cdmon.es are different domains and could be registered by different owners.
Q: How is an IDN multilingual domain registered?
A: You must request the domain registration directly with the special character from the domain registration page.
Q: After registering my multilingual domain (IDN domain), will I be able to create email accounts based on the domain with multilingual characters through cdmon?
A: Support for using email accounts with a multilingual domain is not implemented internationally. The technology is not 100% developed, and it is not expected that all providers will implement it in their systems in the future.
Q: If I cannot use an IDN domain for email, what is it useful for?
A: The latest versions of browsers are able to redirect an IDN domain without difficulty. Therefore, an IDN domain can be used for web hosting services. Since it does not work well for email, it is advisable to contract the service with a non-IDN domain and then redirect the IDN domain to it*. For example: we have the domain familiaperez.es. It has a hosting service contracted with cdmon and also has email accounts such as pedro@familiaperez.es. By registering familiapérez.es (with an accent) we can redirect browser visits to the hosting of familiaperez.es (without an accent).* .cat IDN domains are special because they are linked to the main domain. You do not need to do anything for them to work, as they automatically redirect to the main domain.
Q: What is ACE encoding of a domain?
A: ACE encoding allows the incorporation of internationalized characters into applications designed to work only with ASCII characters. The main use of ACE encoding is to incorporate domains with international characters into the DNS. Thus, a domain like cdmón.es is encoded in ACE as xn--cdmn-sqa.es.
Q: What does Punycode mean?
A: Punycode is another name for ACE encoding. It is an encoding method that uses a Unicode string (such as cdmón) to translate it into a more limited character string compatible with network names. At the beginning of the network, valid characters were limited to those used in the Anglo-Saxon system, leaving special characters out. Punycode was invented so that a string of Latin characters could be translated into the system originally used on the network. Thus, a domain like cdmón.es is encoded in ACE as xn--cdmn-sqa.es.
Q: Which browsers support multilingual domains?
A: Below, we indicate the browsers that support the use of multilingual domains.We recommend that you always keep your browser updated to the latest version for security and compatibility reasons. Internet Explorer 7 or higher (IE5 + Verisign i-Nav Plugin, IE6 + EchIDNA).
Mozilla Firefox 0.6 or higher.
Chrome.
Opera 7.11 or higher.
Safari 1.2 or higher.
Netscape 7.1 or higher.
Mozilla Camino 0.7 or higher.
Konqueror.
Epiphany 1.2.2 or higher.
Galeon 1.3.14 or higher.
AmigaOS AWeb 3.5 or higher.
OmniWeb 5 or higher.
Q: What characters do multilingual domains allow?
A: The characters allowed in multilingual domains depend on the domain type (extension).We have a specific section in our help for each extension, indicating whether it supports IDN and which characters.
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