14 DAY TRIAL // ICANN prepares some new goodies for Internet users from all around the world as the organization will debut a new test next week in order to implement Internationalized Domain Names on the web. In case you don't know its meaning, let me define this for you. What ICANN, which actually stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is aiming to do is to allow consumers from several countries to write the URLs straight into their languages no matter it's Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese or Tamil. Basically, the modification refers to the part of the URL which comes before the dot in order to enable consumers to use their local characters.
"This evaluation represents ICANN's most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO. "ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits."
ICANN seems prepared to start this testing session of the Internationalized Domain Names as the program will be debuted sometime next week. The organization sustains there will be only 11 languages included in the test such as Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
"Right now only the ASCII characters a through z are available for use in top level labels - the part of the address after the dot. Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the languages of world," the same ICANN representative added.