And you think: this is China. It’s supposed to be a place where we’re supposed to see more of this when it comes to URLs:

Yep, you’re supposedly right. Except for one thing. Not a lot of folks are doing Chinese URLs — especially those that involve Chinese ideograms. The sign you’re taking a good look at now is an exception.

Instead, the Chinese are into hanyu pinyin addresses (those with Chinese romanization instead of the characters themselves), abbreviated addresses in pinyin (does stuff like bjjtgl.gov.cn make any sense to you?), and — if all else fails — plain English. They’re dumping their own language — and characters.

As a Mac user (and occasional Windows guy) who has to get about in two languages (at least) every day, it’s no surprise, speaking from personal experience. On both major systems, you have to switch between different input systems with a rather complex keystroke to type in characters or in ASCII characters. As long as there’s that barrier, it’s likely those characters will remain in rarely-used territory on the Web.

Personally speaking, though, it’s a good thing they’re enabled in the first place. Now if we can just get the different keyboard layouts (and language layouts) to work out great so that it’s easier to switch between the lingos…