Internet Language Barriers Broken
Internet Language Barriers Broken
October 10, 2007: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has made an important step towards true internationalisation of the resource by launching a program to test the reality of making domain names available for the characters of non-Latin derived languages.
ICANN will launch the evaluation of the Internationalised Domain Names (IDN) next week in an effort to allow Internet users to test mainstream domains in up to 11 different languages. IDN is the label given by ICANN to describe these domain names that could soon match language characters that do not currently fit with the mould of Latin-derived characters.
If successful, the full introduction of IDNs could one day mean people will be able to write a domain name in the characters of their own language. Currently, users can only use non Latin derived characters after the dot, meaning .com, .net, .org, can not be typed in a language utilising alternate characters.
“Right now only the ASCII characters, a through z are available for use in top level labels – the part of the address after the dot,” says Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO.
The evaluation will need the assistance of users and application developers to ensure its success, but will provide a test-bed offer users the ability to initially access wiki pages with the domain name, example.test in either Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. These languages have been chosen on the basis of the Internet communities to show the most interest in making the idea a reality.
“Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the languages of the world,” says Twomey.
Off these wikis, user will be able to establish subpages in their own names and languages.
“We need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs,” he says. “We need them to get in and push it to its limits.
The avaluation comes seven years after a resolution by the ICANN Board of Directors to recognise, “It is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set.”
The ICANN Board of Directors also state that any successful evaluation must meet their pre-existing standards and values with internationalisation of domain name systems achieved through open, non-proprietary standards.