Internationalized Domain Names

ISOC india Chennai is now an ICANN At Large Structure. One of our areas of focus would be Internationalized Domain Names. Here is a video on IDN for Chapter Members to know the IDN basics:



These "internationalized domain name" (IDN) efforts were the subject of a 25 September 2000 resolution by the ICANN Board of Directors, which recognized "that it is important that the Internet evolve to be more accessible to those who do not use the ASCII character set," and also stressed that "the internationalization of the Internet's domain name system must be accomplished through standards that are open, non-proprietary, and fully compatible with the Internet's existing end-to-end model and that preserve globally unique naming in a universally resolvable public name space."

from Wikipedia:

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many non-English languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese or Hindi. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system.

IDN has, by the standards of the Internet, a long history; it was originally proposed in 1996 (by M. Dürst) and implemented in 1998 (by James Seng under the guidance of T.W.Tan). After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA [1]) was adopted as the chosen standard, and has been rolled out in several top level domains.

In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied. (For the meaning of 'label' and 'ToASCII', see the section ToASCII and ToUnicode below.) In March 2008, the IETF formed a new IDN Working Group to update[2] the current IDNA protocol.

Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names represented by local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese). Many efforts are ongoing in the Internet community to make domain names available in character sets other than ASCII.

Resources:

IDN Basics
IDN Glossary
IDN Wiki
IDN Email Test
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You can test the functionality of these example domain name in a local language and an email address in a local in your browser and email client.

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