Full RSS Feed
Receive
the Free CMSWire Newsletter
It has been about an year since ICANN approved IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) on November 16, 2009. Now, the euphoria is over and the first adopters are already the proud owners of their Internationalized Domain Names. Many Web CMS with an IDN are already in operation but does this mean that you to need to rush to get your IDNs (if you still haven't done it, of course)?
The question about the benefits of IDNs for you and your company might be a no-brainer at all. If you don't do business in a language different from English, then IDNs is not a topic of concern to you. However, if you do business in countries where the official language is not English and you need to get local in order to reach your customers, then you might have to think a bit if the benefits of IDNs outweigh their potential disadvantages.
What's an IDN?
IDNs (Internationalized Domain Name) can be defined in many ways but probably the best definition is given by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the institution that handles them. The definition is as follows: “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)” (source: http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/).
The adoption of IDNs might not look a big deal but actually it is. Prior to the official green light to IDNs, it wasn't possible to register a domain name with characters different from the characters in the English alphabet. This was quite an issue for languages such as French, Spanish, German or the Scandinavian languages, which use a Latin alphabet but they have their specific symbols (i.e. Non-ASCII symbols), which are not present in the English alphabet. The domains and URLs in all non-ASCII languages had to transcribe their special symbols and use them this way.
It was even worse for Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and other alphabets where the symbols aren't even close to Latin symbols. These languages couldn't register a domain name or have URLs in their alphabet. It felt unfair — the Internet is global but you can't register a domain name and have URLs in your language.
The reason for this was purely technical — the standard was still in the makings. There were many technical issues that had to be solved and without going into the technical details (you can find more of them in this FAQ) that made IDNs possible, it is not an exaggeration to say that IDNs are a huge step towards the internationalization of the Internet.
As of today, one year after IDNs are possible, there aren't millions of them in use. One of the reasons is that a specific country domain needs to go through a lengthy approval procedure before registrars can start offering it to the public. Thus not many countries have their IDNs approved and therefore can't use them. The list of approved IDNs (or IDN ccTLD — IDN country code Top Level Domains) is updated frequently with new domains.
What I Will Gain If I Have an IDN
In addition to the fact that the IDN ccTLD of your country hasn't been approved yet, there are also other reasons why IDNs are still not in wide use. Many companies and individuals haven't even heard of IDN ccTLDs and some of those who have, are pretty skeptical and don't rush to register such a domain. This is easy to understand but when you have in mind the advantages of IDNs, maybe a second thought is necessary. Here are some of the benefits of having an IDN:
Continue reading this article:
Email It
