On 2011-09-22 Adam Thompson wrote:
CIRA, the .ca domain registrar, is proposing to allow a restricted subset of IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) in order to support accented French characters in domain names.
(Another super late reply)
I read through a few pages of the end-user comments on the link provided and I am very happy to see that:
a) Canadians that bothered to comment appear extremely intelligent, intelligible, and sensible
and
b) it was virtually unanimous that accents were a bad idea or had to be implemented extremely carefully.
My big concern was making domain spoofing even easier, like registering [accented e]bay.ca and then stealing passwords. With the tiny size of fonts I use, I'd be screwed if I had to differentiate between the variations of e. Not to mention my IBM clicky keyboard has no accented chars and I have no idea whatsoever how to input them using alternate methods!
It will be interesting to see how this plays out now that the commenting is closed. Hopefully they'll listen to the excellent user contributions.