Internet to Become More Multilingual

Via Mail & Guardian Online (South Africa) -

The internet's key oversight agency is on track to start testing addresses entirely in foreign characters by November, but rules for determining which ones to permit likely will take another year or two to develop.

Individuals and companies outside the United States long have clamoured for non-English scripts, finding restrictive the current limitation of domain names to 37 characters: a to z, 0 to 9 and the hyphen.

Addresses partly in foreign languages are sometimes possible, but the suffix -- the ".com" part of an address -- for now requires non-English speakers to type English characters.

The "live" tests later this year are designed to make sure browsers, email programs and other applications will work well with the foreign characters, said Vint Cerf, chairperson of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

"We've already done the testing in the laboratories," Cerf said as Icann's general meetings ended on Friday in San Juan, Puerto Rico. "We're confident that none of the infrastructure is likely to encounter a problem, but you really don't know until you are in the live environment."

Thus, engineers are planning to feed the internet's domain-name directories with nonsensical strings that can be removed quickly should trouble arise. Even if they succeed, however, more work remains on developing policies on such names.