In a move that is being billed as a historic achievement for one of the world's leading languages, web addresses will now be available in Arabic as part of a wider move to open up cyberspace to domain names in multiple, non-Latin scripts.
Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, announced on Thursday that it had begun registering names under the .misr domain. “Misr” is the Arabic name for Egypt. The first three companies to use it are TE Data, Vodafone Data and Link Registrar, said the country's Communications Minister, Tarek Kamel, hailing “a milestone in internet history”.
Instead of using the old .eg domain name, organisations in Egypt can use “.misr”, written from right to left in Arabic script as the default country code for domestic websites. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are also introducing the new codes, respectively “.Al-Saudiah” and “.Emarat”.
One of the first of these “internationalised domain names” leads to the Egyptian Communications Ministry. If a browser has the correct fonts installed, the user should see an Arabic name. When you mouse-over or click on the link, what you see will depend on the browser. “Confusing for us, a relief for the Arab world,” commented the specialist IT site THINQ.co.uk.
The move comes six months after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, Icann, approved the use of non-Latin domain names.
The innovation is a significant moment for the internationalisation of the world wide web — half of whose users do not use a Latin script as their primary language.
Arabic accounts for one per cent of all web content — though its estimated 280 million speakers constitute five per cent of the global population — but until now it has had to be hosted under Latin addresses. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
