The Hindu : Non-English domains coming

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Apr 02, 2003

Business

Business

Non-English domains coming

By Our Special Correspondent

BANGALORE APRIL 1 . Here is some news that should interest Indian language IT users. The Great Lakes IT Report from Michigan has quoted the chairman of the Internet's key oversight body as saying that Internet domain names in languages other than English should be available within the next few weeks or months. Vincent G. Cerf said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, would likely approve technical standards soon. The standards will allow the world's computers built around English to recognise Chinese, Arabic and other languages. Cerf made his comments at a weeklong ICANN meeting that ends Friday. ICANN is the body selected by the U.S. Commerce Department in 1998 to oversee the Net's addressing system.

The core computers that handle online addresses now understand only the 26 English letters, ten numerals and a hyphen, along with a period for splitting addresses into sections. Tildes, slashes and other characters are not part of the domain name and are handled by separate computers. Other languages must be converted into a string of the permitted characters.

For the past few years, a separate body, the Internet Engineering Task Force, has been working on how to convert all that smoothly, behind the scenes. Though some non-English names have already been available on a test basis, ICANN's approval of the new standards would make them official and help ensure that they actually work. Even with the changes, Cerf said, the domain name's suffix — like ".com'' or ".org'' — would remain in English for the time being.

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