The top-level domain (TLD) “xn—kpry57d” is an internationalized country code top-level domain (ccTLD) that represents 台灣 (or “Taiwan” in English) in the Chinese language. Internationalized country code top-level domains, or IDN ccTLDs, are specific domain name labels that are represented by characters from different scripts and languages. According to The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the concept of IDN ccTLDs was developed to cater to those users who might prefer to use the Internet in their local languages and scripts using the Domain Name System (DNS).
A standard ASCII-based domain name system could not cater to this demand because it is limited to Latin characters a-z, the numbers 0-9 and the hyphen. As the Internet’s user base continued to grow worldwide, the limitations of ASCII became increasingly more apparent. To address these alphanumeric limitations, the IDN system was developed, a significant contribution being from IETF’s IDN working group.
This system essentially uses an encoding method called Punycode, which is a way to represent Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) with the limited character set (ASCII) supported by the Domain Name System.
In accordance with this, the IDN ccTLD for Taiwan in traditional Chinese characters is represented in Punycode as “xn—kpry57d”. Each punycode label starts with a prefix “xn—”, and then a string of characters representing the non-ASCII domain label. For instance, translating the traditional Chinese characters 台灣 into punycode results in “kpry57d”. Hence, the IDN ccTLD for Taiwan in Punycode becomes “xn—kpry57d”.
Such IDN ccTLDs are important for preserving the Internet’s linguistic diversity, and for making the World Wide Web more universally accessible. More than 50 different scripts are now supported by the IDN system, including but not limited to scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, and Greek.
Sources Used:
1. “About IDN ccTLDs,” ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
2. “Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) – 2012 Procedures,” ICANN
3. “RFC3492 – Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA),” IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)
