Wikpedia states, "An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari or Hebrew." This example is an example of a greek IDN.I have been following the news on this topic for about the past month and just heard today that ICANN has finally authorized a new plan that will allow web extensions and e-mail addresses to contain non-latin characters. This is a historic change considering that for over four decades only the latin character set has been accessible for IDNs. With this new announcement, there will be over 100,000 characters available that represent the various languages of the world.
ICANN felt this was a necessary step in order to expand the use of the worldwide web for people who do not understand English. Beginning November 16th, applications will be accepted for top level domains or internet extensions based on that nations character set. In the future, ICANN is hoping to incorporate the top level domains (i.e. .com, .org and .net) into the IDN system.
After years of testing, studying and discussing international domain names we will soon operate as a global, worldwide network! Make sure to click on this link, it's a great video and explains it all!
Great Post!
ReplyDeleteAt the moment I am worndering how we can access these websites, or how we can send them emails when they use characters that we don't have on our keyboard!?
Interesting post you got here Pat! I can't really read the URL from the image you uploaded with it, but I get the idea of your post and it's a nice feature, that I'm rather surprised about. I'm surprised because I thought that they would already have implemented something like this long ago, but better late than never! I wonder what Ahmed thinks about this (being that is native language is Arabic)
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing that it took so long to authorize these changes. Considering that most businesses are doing business globally and the fact that many people speak more than one language, this is an important step. Great post.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Patty, I do agree with Jassin though about how we would be able to access these sites and email addesses if we don't have the proper keyboard. I guess it would be something that we would have to invest in if we would want to access those pages.
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