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Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN approves non-Latin characters for domain names

Cyrillic URL
As expected, the international agency that regulates internet domain names has approved a new rule that allows URLs to be written using non-Latin characters. In other words, native speakers of Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hindi, and other languages will be able to spell out web addresses using their oown alphabets.

Roughly 1.6 billion internet users speak languages that don't use Latin characters. That's half of the people that usee the internet.

Officials describe the move as the "biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago." Nations and territories will be able to apply for internet extensions reflecting their regions starting on November 16th. We'll probably start seeing Internationalized Domain Names starting in mid-2010.

[via TechCrunch]

Filed under: Internet, News

ICANN set to approve web addresses using non-Latin characters

Cyrillic URL
There are web pages written in virtually every living language. If you read Japanese, Korean, Arabic, or Hebrew, odds are you can find web sites written in your native tongue. But in order to find them, you'll probably have to enter a string of Western characters into your browser's address bar.

That's because up until now, the organization that oversees domain names has only accepted URLs with Latin characters. But this week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to approve a new rule allowing addresses to be written in different scripts, including Arabic, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, and Cyrillic (Russian).

While the change might not affect English speakers reading this web site all that much, this is huge news for the 1.6 billion internet users who speak languages that don't use Latin characters. So while we have no plans to change the web address for Download Squad, I did consult with Google Translate today to learn that the site would be called something like загрузка Сборная in Russian. Because, you never know.

The new rule could be adopted as soon as Friday, although we probably wouldn't see the new Internationaliised Domain names (IDNs) until mid 2010.

ICANN has been looking at the change for a few years. But there have been technical kinks to work out. Essentially, under the new system, users will be able to enter URLs in a variety of different scripts and the domain name system will apply some new translation techniques in order to ensure that users are taken to the correct web page.

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