Case sensitive hostnames

I have a very quick question regarding case sensitive Greek hostnames. For example, if I wished to register the hostname using the Greek letter omega Ω, like so: ΩΩΩΩ.com, it would in actual fact appear as the lower case version: ωωωω.com.

In English of course, this is also true, where E would become e for example. It is not a problem if it is to be read as a language, but if the purpose of this is to use omega as the symbol 'Ω' in the hostname rather than a letter, then it is problematic.

Is there any way around this, in order to maintain the uppercase letter? Are there domain registering sites that offer this type of service?

Solution 1:

The Internet standards (Request for Comments) for protocols mandate that component hostname labels may contain only the ASCII letters 'a' through 'z' (in a case-insensitive manner), the digits '0' through '9', and the hyphen ('-'). The original specification of hostnames in RFC 952, mandated that labels could not start with a digit or with a hyphen, and must not end with a hyphen. However, a subsequent specification (RFC 1123) permitted hostname labels to start with digits. No other symbols, punctuation characters, or white space are permitted.

Hostname is Case Insensitive.

Solution 2:

No, and this is by design. Uppercase characters are actually completely disallowed by the new standard and were converted to lowercase by the old.

From the IDN FAQ:

Q: How does IDNA2008 differ from IDNA2003?

A: It disallows about eight thousand characters that used to be valid, including all uppercase characters, full/half-width variants, symbols, and punctuation. It also interprets four characters differently.

Q: Why does IDNA2003 map final sigma (ς) to sigma (σ), map eszett (ß) to "ss", and delete ZWJ/ZWNJ?

A: This decision about the mapping of these characters followed recommendations for case-insensitive matching in the Unicode Standard. These characters are anomalous: the uppercase of ς is Σ, the same as the uppercase of σ. Note that the text "ΒόλοΣ.com", which appears on http://Βόλος.com, illustrates this: the normal case mapping of Σ is to σ. If σ and ς were not treated as case variants in Unicode, there wouldn't be a match between ΒόλοΣ and Βόλος.