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Comment by Chris8535 | Hacker News Reader

how will users with North American keyboards access websites with characters not on their keyboards?

This depends on the OS but you can usually just switch the keyboard language, use alt codes or load from a character map app. Chances are if you don't know how to write the script, you won't know how to read the language being used either.

Unfortunately the default settings for the OSes I've tried are extremely limited with respect to multilingual input. I can read and write some Spanish and Japanese for instance, but haven't had the need to for a while now. So my current laptop doesn't have an IME set up. I'm not even sure how I'd go about doing so. (Though Japanese IMEs are pretty slick. Think code completion, but for kanji.)

I had the same trouble, couldn't figure out how to get my mac to deal with hiragana/katakana/kanji input a while ago when learning japanese. Anybody know how to do this?

This actually relatively simple on a Mac. All you have to do is go to International settings in Preferences and select check Japanese as an input language. Then you can select between the character sets and languages from the menu bar (or your desired hotkey).

One of the major reasons I switched to a Mac was because font rendering was a lot clearer for East Asian languages.

Thanks for that, not sure how I managed to miss something so obvious back then!

Click on links, like they always have? :)

Almost no one types an URL. They type search terms and follow links. And needless to say, if you can't type the URL in its native language, you're unlikely to be able to read the page anyway.

And if you really need to be able to see a normalized ASCII representation, it's still there. Non-ASCII DNS names are actually stored in "punycode", a semi-readable 7 bit printable encoding:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

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