Russia launches Cyrillic top-level domain
Medvedev applauds президент.рф
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Russia yesterday acquired the Cyrillic top-level domain .рф, as reps from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) handed over the corresponding administration certificate at an internet forum in Moscow.
This went down extremely well with Dmitry Medvedev, according to Pravda. The president told the "committee for modernization and technological development of the nation’s economy": “I have just checked, the website президент.рф is up and running. The Cyrillic website of the government downloads too.
"The websites of other state departments will have Cyrillic domains ready this month. Commercial companies will be able to use Cyrillic domain names a bit later. Russia has become the first country in the world which obtained the national domain of the top level.”
Now that the Russian Federation has its own locally-lingoed TLD, it can get on with Medvedev's vision of becoming a world IT superpower. He's apparently set his sights on nurturing a powerful Russian comms bear, and told the gathering: “We do not have to invent a wooden bicycle in the field of communication standards. But if Russia could become a trendsetter in the field of IT technologies, it would be good.
"It is much more pleasant when the world lives on your standards than when you have to adjust to someone else’s standards.”
Steve Jobs beware the proprietry-wireless-standard-connected иПад, defiantly running Moscow's own version of флаш. ®
Bootnote
* президент.рф = president.rf
COMMENTS
CRLs
If you type an address in Akkadian, Assyrian, etc, does that make it a Cuneiform Resource Locator?
Do it properly?
президент.рф is all very well, but are new versions of browsers going to take aliases for protocol names, so you don't have to write a mixed-script http://президент.рф/ but can write хттп://президент.рф/ (or even translate "HyperText Transport Protocol" into Russian (Google Translate says "Гипертекстовый транспортный протокол" / Gipertekstoviy Transportniy Protokol) and take the inititals of that)?
And if you start typing in Mongol Bichig, does the URL bar re-orient itself for vertical scripts? Enquiring minds want to know.
The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.
Instead of relying on Google for a translation you could just try pasting президент.рф into your browser's URL field and see that it's in fact the correct name of the domain.
1. It's a voiced s, "з", not a voiceless s, "с". Google gives you the anglo-saxon phonetic equivalent, "prezident", while the Reg article gives the translation of the word, "president".
2. Never rely on automatic translation unless you have a clue about the original language as well as the target language.
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