September 24, 2011

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) is thinking about making its .CA domain extension a little more fully Canadian, by allowing websites with a .CA extension to use accented French characters in the URL.

As spelled out in an email to holders of .CA domains, "This means you could soon see domain names like préside.ca, grâce.ca, etc."

Which is great. We just always kind of assumed that accented characters like the cé cédille (ç) weren't available in domain names for the same reason exclamation marks and ampersands aren't (you know, because they're so typographically complicated that if browsers around the world tried to read them at the same moment, it would bring down the internet faster than the combined efforts of a young Johnny Lee Miller and a pre-Pitt-ed Angelina Jolie).

The characters CIRA are considering adding are as follows:

• é, ë, ê, è
• à, â
• ô
• ù, û, ü
• ç
• î, ï

And if you, like us, sometimes forget how to make those characters appear on your computer screen, here's a handy reference doc from Penn State that's got you covered, from umlaut (ü ) to circumflex (â), from acute (é) to grave (à).