ICANN to Allow Non-Latin Characters in Domains
ICANN is tomorrow expected to approve the availability of domain names in non-Latin alphabets.
Switched this week reports that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is set to allow Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Cyrillic or Greek users create web addresses in their native character sets.
"This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Switched cites ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush as saying at a press conference in Seoul, South Korea this week.
Approximately half of Internet users are native speakers of languages that do not use the Latin alphabet. If the motion is approved, we should see the first non-Roman domain names sometime in mid-2010.
Check out the full story here.
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Jane McEntegart is a writer, editor, and marketing communications professional with 17 years of experience in the technology industry. She has written about a wide range of technology topics, including smartphones, tablets, and game consoles. Her articles have been published in Tom's Guide, Tom's Hardware, MobileSyrup, and Edge Up.
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Honis has this been planned for some time or is it part of the new international based control of ICANN?Reply
Can't wait to field questions about blank boxes in address bars! -
Jerky_san This will kinda crazy cause now you will have to know how to type the language to search for something in another country..Reply -
wildwell Wow! How am I gonna point my browser to those sites!?Reply
I bet this will make it easier for China to censor the web for it's citizens. Now they can just block all URLs with western letters. -
The internet will get slower and use more bandwidth.Reply
ASCII (1 byte) vs UNICODE (2 bytes)
DNS FAIL 2010! -
MamiyaOtaru Jerky_sanThis will kinda crazy cause now you will have to know how to type the language to search for something in another country..whaatReply
Do you search by typing in the URL of random foreign sites and seeing if they talk about your subject or something? Or do you put a search term into google? This will change nothing. You'll google a term, and click on the link.
Now I could it getting harder to go to a foreign language site you already know about (say, pillows.gr.jp) which I visit despite not being able to read it (babelfish yay). If they change that URL to use japanese character I won't be able to just type it in. But searching will be unchanged. -
acecombat Ok so soon we will be browsing to www.(teepee symbol)(Hash)(Symbol that looks like a flower).cnReply -
werfu ReplyChinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, Cyrillic or Greek
No European characters? If UTF8 is used than every character of the table should be used.