[LINK] "The multilingual web: A year of non-Latin script domain names"

[rfmcdonald]

Techmeme pointed me to Paul Sawers' article at The Next Web on the usage of non-Latin script domain names on the Internet, one year after the web finally embraced non-Latin scripts fully.

The permitted character set of the DNS has precluded the full representation of many languages in their native alphabets (scripts) within domain names. However, ICANN did approve the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) system many years ago, and this system maps Unicode strings into the valid DNS character set using Punycode.

In short, this allows the transliteration or conversion between Unicode domain names and their ASCII equivalents (prefixed with xn--), thus allowing users to navigate the Internet in their own language. The IDNA system is designed to ensure that the Web doesn’t fragment into a number of localized versions separated by script.

So, Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) have been available for registration at the second level for a while, meaning in countries such as Japan you could register a domain using a local script rather than a Latin-based one – however, it would still have been appended with ‘.jp’, rather than a local script equivalent.

And this was the big change that came into effect last year. It became possible to register IDNs for ccTLDs such as السعودية. for Saudi Arabia, and .рф for Russia, and this at last meant domain names – including the country code – could contain non-Latin based characters throughout. This opened up the Internet’s addressing system to the majority of the world’s population, who have little comprehension of Latin-based scripts.

In Russia and Saudi Arabia, the huge booms in native-script domains also worked alongside growth in Latin-script domains, too. Support problems aside, the experiment has gone well. Well, mostly:

Greece was rejected for .ελ, because it resembled .EA – which, incidentally isn’t being used as a ccTLD, but it is a two letter string in the ISO-3166 reserve list.

And Bulgaria was rejected by ICANN way back in May 2010, because its proposed ccTLD – .бг – was visually similar to the .br Brazilian ccTLD.

That, and (arguably) more important concerns about the new domains actually working with E-mail.