I've asked a similar question before and then deleted it. Now it becomes relevant again - is this a good idea to translate urls or not? How about query parameters?
Do all modern browsers display unicode characters in the URL bar correctly?
Could you advice?
As to the basic idea of translating URLs I'd say yes, definitely translate them. It's a beautiful little detail.
It gets tough with the Unicode, though, I think. While all modern browsers can, to my knowledge, deal effortlessly with UTF-8 characters in URLs, it is possible that a translated URL shows up in many other places:
and so on. From what I can see looking around on SO, this is possible, but shaky.
For latin-based languages, I'd say translate them, but use ASCII characters only. That's how I would do it in the german translation, for one. Every language has their own, safe rules how to deal with that (in German, ä becomes ae, in Finnish, ä becomes a, and so on).
It's obviously not a solution for the rest of the world, and it would be nice to be able to have cyrillic, chinese, japanese, korean...... question texts in the URL. Hmm.
Update: I've posted a question on SO with good results. Apparently, percent-encoded URLs will work fine, and displayed correctly in the browser. Evgeny, what do you think?
All Modern browsers showing unicode url correctly except IE.
For my askbot app I badly need this feature.
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