International IDN domains
What is IDN? It is an acronym that stands for Internationalized Domain Name. IDNs are domain names written in foreign languages like Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. They are also sometimes referred to as multilingual, multinational or international domains.IDN domains can be registered through many ICANN accredited registrars in the .com, .net, .org, .info and .biz domain extensions. They are also available under many ccTLDs including .de, .cn and .jp. An example of an IDN domain is imobiliária.com, which means real estate in Portuguese. Fully multilingual IDNs, which have the name and extension both in the foreign language, are expected to be available in the future.
Presently, in order to be able to resolve internationalized domain names and websites, you must either download a special browser plug-in from Verisign, use an IDN enabled browser like FireFox, or access the IDN using its Punycode. This will likely all soon change however as Microsoft intends on making default IDN resolution a feature of it’s new IE7 browser due out this year. This should make it easier for people to visit and advertise IDN websites. Some feel this may also increase traffic that may be coming to IDNs via browser type-ins and increase interest in IDNs by speculators and developers alike from all over the world across many different languages.
IDN domains serve a very important purpose. They allow people to communicate websites and URLs in their native languages. Up till now, people who speak other languages have had to make do with English language ASCII letters and numbers. IDN, though not without technical challenges, offers a way for people to finally be able to communicate in a language that they understand.
This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 8:16 am and is filed under world wide web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
