Tras unos días sin ordenador debido a que repentinamente mi monitor se quedó literalmente en negro, quiero hablar de una noticia que leí el otro día en ALT1040 y que me parece, cuanto menos, estúpida.
Surely, when reading the title of this entry, many have had the famous phrase of the Minister of Culture, Carmen Calvo, come to mind in which she made a “somewhat strange” request to Bill Gates: she literally asked for the domain of the Ñ on the Internet (God knows what this woman intended to say, although, if God existed, I am sure that he would prefer not to know).
Well, starting in October, all .es domains will be able to use special characters from Spanish and the rest of the languages of Spain (such as Catalan, Galician, or Basque), so we will be able to find domains like ñu.es or rené.es. At first it doesn’t seem like a bad idea given that most of the domains are already taken but… How many countries have these special characters on the keyboard apart from Spanish-speaking countries? Possibly none. That’s why I think the idea is pretty stupid.
Imagine for a moment that I bought the domain rené.com. People who do not have accent marks on their keyboard would find it impossible to enter said domain, so I would be getting rid “just because” of… 95% of internet users? There would always be the possibility of finding the page in search engines, I know, but… Is that professional? The only advantage I think could be the redirection to existing domains written without special characters to prevent user confusion, but I highly doubt it will be enough for them to be successful. In short, I believe that these two examples could be enough to predict the death of domains written with special characters before they are put into operation.