Are we one step closer to the World Wide Web?
May 6th, 2010
Today is an historic day for internet users across the globe, a report by the BBC announced on its news site earlier, as it marks the day that non-Latin web addresses have gone live.
Net regulator the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have switched on the long awaited system which allows full web addresses to feature no Latin characters. This means the arrival international domains which can be written in scripts such as Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic.
More than 20 countries have requested approval for international domains from ICANN in 11 different languages. In some parts of the world, such as Russia (where the ICANN approved Cyrillic IDNs in November last year), the registration of native character based domains has been going on for a while, and the launch means that millions of people will finally be able to type web addresses in their own language.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are the first counties to have Arabic country codes that will look like this:
• Egypt: مصر
• Saudi Arabia: السعودية
• United Arab Emirates: امارات
“All three are Arabic script domains, and will enable domain names written fully right-to-left,” said Kim Davies of ICANN in a blog post.
When ICANN first announced its plans for non-Latin web names it said it was the “biggest change” to the net “since it was invented 40 years ago”.
“Over half the internet users around the world don’t use a Latin-based script as their native language,” said Mr Beckstrom at the time.
“IDNs are about making the internet more global and accessible for everyone.”
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/10100108.stm
By Anna Pearce, Oban Multilingual.
