A Guide to IDNs: Definition, History and Current Usage
From WikiName
An Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) allows non-English speaking web users to type web addresses completely in their native scripts without alternating between native and English keyboards.
The introduction of IDNs in July 2003 means that web addresses can now contain scripts or diacritics such as Russian, Japanese or Arabic. Before introducing IDNs, the Internet standard for domain names disallowed these native scripts from being entered as web addresses.
As such, web users who do not use the Roman alphabet-the 26 letters of the English alphabet, the numerals 0-9 and the hyphen-had to switch keyboards to type secondary-level domain and top-level domain names. A secondary-level domain name is the name(s) that lie between the first and the final dot in a web address; a top-level domain name is the "com" or "net" in a web address.
This move towards total efficiency follows a decision that allowed only partial localization of web addresses. In 2003, the Verisign-sponsored Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) developed a program called punycode that converts native scripts into Roman or ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) characters. Punycode is an algorithm that allows web browsers to convert native scripts into a string of Roman/ASCII characters. Punycode domains are marked by their "xn" beginnings.
Under the partial adoption scheme of 2003, only secondary-level domain names were converted into native scripts. Some of the languages that signed under the partial adoption scheme include French, German, Portuguese, Swedish and Spanish. And although these European languages share most of the Roman alphabet with English, characters such as (, , , or ) are not conveniently available on keyboards, so IDNs became important. Other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Russian also signed up for IDNs by 2004.
All these languages have shown interest in the total localization of domain names. However, in November 2007, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) tested 11 languages with the total domain names- secondary and top-level domain names. These 11 languages include: Arabic, Persian, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
But some speakers of the different Chinese dialects, South Korean nationals, some Arab-speaking nations and certain European websites have developed IDNs independent of ICANN. Fearing that the bureaucracy that surrounded the launch of IDNs in 2003 would not end, these interests took matters into their own hands and developed alternatives to ICANN's IDNs.
The idea of IDNs started as early as 1996 when it was first proposed by M. Duerst and was implemented in theory in 1998 by T. W. Tan et al. But it was not until much fervent outcry from non-English speaking web users, many competing proposals on how to proceed with IDNs and much debate that the application of IDNs was finally rolled out in 2003.
Now that IDNs have been launched in its totality and on a large scale as of 2007, many non-English speaking web users should be able to gain access to the Internet. According to Internet statistics, only one out of a possible six billion persons use the Internet today.
Therefore, web hosting companies expect a boom in registration for IDNs that cater to local customers who do not speak English.
Although IDNs have many uses to native businesses and native users, IDNs are not without their fault. Many unscrupulous persons have used IDNs in phishing schemes to steal personal and financial information from visitors of their sites.
Author: Susan Callum
