Macrons within New Zealand domain names and international domains (.com, .org. .net, etc ) are possible, but with many limitations with finding a suitable New Zealand provider.
.nz
Since July 26 2010 in New Zealand, all authorised domain.nz registrars have to be able to register a .nz domain name with a macron, they are not obliged to advertise the fact or to offer such services as it is a minority of users who will require such a name and a large cost to some to implement the service.
The New Zealand Domain Name Commissioner has a list of all Authorised .nz Domain Name registrars with notes of who is an IDN friendly Registrar. An IDN friendly registrar is a registrar that makes it easy to register an IDN. The list is at http://dnc.org.nz/story/authorised-registrars and was used to write this article.
There are currently only 3 IDN friendly registrars and only two of them are in New Zealand.
http://www.metaname.co.nz (New Zealand based and easy to register)
http://www.godzone.net.nz (New Zealand based and difficult to register)
http://www.1api.de (Germany based and easy to register).
.māori.nz
Another not so well known fact is that by default, all .maori.nz domain names are also available with a macron i.e. www.taiuru.maori.nz and www.taiuru.māori.nz are the same domain name and did not require a separate registration.
While the software and Internet industries scramble to accommodate non English languages for email and browsers, there are some limitations for browsers and many for email clients.
International macron domain names.Unfortunately the New Zealand based IDN friendly registrars do not allow you to search for .com or any other international domain name with a macron name.
If you want to register an international domain name such as .com and org etc., the Wellington based company http://www.IwantyMy.Name will allow you to search their database if you know the Unicode for the macron. An example, ngā.com will need to be typed as ngā.com. A full list of html macrons is below.
If you are happy to use an international company to register your domain names, the German based company 1api.de http://www.1api.de offer macron domain names in all available domain names. 1api will allow you to search their database with a macron but will return results using Puynycode . A full list of Punycode macrons is below.
Umlaut domain names
It is possible to register an international domain name with umlauts ä, ë ,ï ,ö, ü. While these are not macrons and not a part of the Māori language, they will appear to be macrons if the browser has a specialised Māori font installed as the default font. Considering the vast amount of Māori language speakers no longer use Māori fonts, this is not a recommended solution.
.iwi.nz
Registering a macron in a .iwi.nz domain name details can be found in the previous post.
Macron conversion charts
Macron Punycode HTML
ā xn—yda ā
ē xn—hea ē
ī xn--5ea ī
ō xn--4fa ō
ū xn—zga ū
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