This week, international domain names that can be written in languages other than English, are likely to be approved by members of ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers).
A member meeting taking place in Seoul should confirm the change by Friday which will see the potential for web addresses in Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic become available for use.
Rod Beckstrom (keynote speaker of The Next Web Conference 2007), ICANN’s new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.
The greatest obstacle will be the creation of a translation system that allows multiple scripts to be converted to the right address but ICANN are confident that after years of testing, the systems works reliably.
ICANN, formed in 1998 by the US government, was recently given more autonomy after Washington relaxed its control over how the Internet is run.
GOSTARIA DE VER VCS NA WEB…..
There have always been non-English web addresses.
English is not the only langauge to use the Roman alphabet. French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Turkish. The list goes on.
What we’re looking at is the idea of non-Roman alphabets, not non-English ones.
This will make chaos on web.
Bob, you’re only half right. You say “English is not the only langauge to use the Roman alphabet. French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Turkish. The list goes on.”
But, in practice it’s still English only because it’s not possible to display all “French, German, Spanish, Portugese, Turkish…” letters with accents: â ä à å ç ê ë è ï î… they are all substituted with English letters “a c e i” and it’s fair to say “web domains are all English”.
It will be very interesting in Serbia!
There are no “w” in Serbian language!! :)
So, “www” will be?
I’m expecting a new raft of exploits to come from this as people use Unicode buffer overflows in buggy implementions of the DNS systems.
We’ve had these for a while, but being in another part of the address may well expose further bad code.
Just a prediction :)
What about linking? Will everything get a reset? A nice job for Google…
Interesting
Anyway Internet Explorer 6 won’t suport it and so I don’t see any use for that!
Vow. Complete boost for local ecommerce market!
Thanks Bob,
I was thinking the same thing!
You’re quite right, i’ve amended the title accordingly
So, serbian will change/adapt their lenguage to fit 21 century and put W into alfabet, my dear frend from past :)
Nice trolling there, Mate.
However, put in your terms, “www” itself is a 20th century prefix – no modern website should require it.
But if you keep it so dire, just switch to cyrillic keyboard and type њњњ.