Internet addresses, now in Hindi!
AFP
New York: The Roman alphabet will lose some of its
dominance of the Internet beginning Monday when the
organisation overseeing Web site addresses starts
testing 11 new languages for domain names.
In a long-awaited break from its devotion to the Roman
alphabet, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers) announced Thursday that it
will test registering Web site domain names in Arabic,
Persian, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Hebrew,
Japanese, Tamil, and both, simplified and traditional
Chinese.
This will be one of the biggest changes to the
Internet since it was created, said ICAAN president
and chief executive Paul Twomey.
People creating Web addresses with non-Roman lettering
will be routed to a wiki page and required to use
.test instead of commonly used domain name endings
such as .com, .net, .org, or dots before country
abbreviations.
The results of the test will determine whether ICANN
sanctions using languages written in alphabets other
than English for complete domain names.
Presently, Web site creators can use other language
characters before the dots in Web site addresses, but
endings must be in English characters such as
.com or .net.
Right now only the characters A through Z are
available for use in the part of the address after the
dot, Twomey explained.
This test is ICANNs most important step to date
toward multilingual domain names, according to Twomey.
Approximately 37 per cent of the worlds Internet
users are in Asia and another two per cent are in the
Middle East, while 47 per cent are in North America
and Europe, according to the Internet World Statistics
Web site.
There are a billion people on the Internet, which
means there are five billion not on it, said Paul
Hoffman, a US-based programmer who created the
standards
behind the so-called internationalised domain names.
The new names are not for the current users, but for
the next billion.
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