Users' help needed for the Internet's big change

Stuart Corner
Sunday, 14 October 2007 16:11

Your IT - Home IT

ICANN is set to launch a trial in preparation for enabling domain names to be written in scripts other than roman (as used for English, French and most European languages), and is calling for users to help with the evaluation.

Thirteen different scripts have been selected for the trial: Arabic, Persian Arabic, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Cyrillic (Russian), Devanagari (Hindi), Greek, Hangul (Korean), Hebrew, Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana (Japanese) and Tamil. ICANN says these were chosen because they represent "the Internet communities that have shown the most interest in moving internationalised domain names from concept to reality."

"This evaluation represents ICANN's most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalised Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and CEO.

Twomey added: "ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits."

For the evaluation ICANN has created versions, one in each script of a new top level domain .test From 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in the test scripts and create their own subpages (example.teset/myname) which they will then be able to invite others to try an access.

At present non-ASCII characters can be used only before the top level domain name - the part of the address before the dot. The top level domain name can use only the letters of the English alphabet

Twomey said: "IDNs will change this so that literally tens of thousands of characters will be available to the world... "Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the languages of the world."

More information on the IDN program is available at: http://icann.org/topics/idn/