WHAT ARE IDNs?

 

IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) are foreign language (not English) domain names that contain non-ASCII (A-Z, 0-9) characters. At the moment the IDN is followed by either a Generic Top Level Domain (gTLD), such as .com, .net, .org. Or else as a Country Coded Top Level Domain (ccTLD), such as .cn, .jp, .es, .de.
Work is currently being done in implementing full IDNs (IDN.IDN), so that the extensions are also in the foreign language, although work on this is likely to be a while away at the moment. With preliminary testing only starting at the end of 2007.

See ICANN's introduction to IDNs video below:

Some examples of IDNs:

• http://cartõesdevisita.com
• онлайнигра.net
• http://书签.com

Domains which are not English, but do not contain any non-ASCII characters (e.g. GutenMorgen.com, Computadora.net) are not IDNs.

 

What are IDNs? (In other Languages)

Arabic العربية • Chinese 中文 • Czech Česky • English • French Français • German Deutsch • Japanese 日本語 • Korean 한국어 • Norwegian ‪Norsk • Spanish Español

 

 

WHAT LANGUAGES ARE IDNs AVAILABLE IN?

IDNs use Unicode, which covers almost all scripts in use today. There are nearly 40 character sets available, making over 350 languages available.
Therefore if allowed by the TLD IDNs are available in all of these languages, including; Arabic, Greek, Russian, Korean , Japanese, Hebrew, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), etc etc.
The registries operating each TLD, decide which languages (scripts) are allowable on their TLD.
At the moment a quick summary is:
com All IDNs are allowed
net All IDNs are allowed
org Danish German Hungarian Icelandic Korean Latvian Lithuanian Polish Spanish Swedish
info Danish German Hungarian Icelandic Korean Latvian Lithuanian Polish Swedish
biz Chinese Danish German Icelandic Japanese Korean Norwegian Spanish Swedish
ws All IDNs are allowed
cc All IDNs are allowed
tv All IDNs are allowed
Generally all ccTLDs that offer IDN capabilities will support and allow registration of IDNs in that countries local language/s. i.e. cn support Chinese, .jp supports Japanese, .fi supports Finnish, etc.

 

 

HOW DO IDN’s WORK?

IDNs require a IDN compatible web browser to be able to resolve IDN domains properly. Any browser made in the last couple of years should be fine (Firefox, Opera, IE7, Safari, etc), the main problem browser is Internet Explorer 6, which not only is full of security holes, terrible for CSS and non-compliant to web standards, but also will not resolve IDNs properly. If you are using Internet explorer we strongly advise that you upgrade to any of the below:

 

In IDN compatible browsers, once a foreign character is detected, it will be converted into an ASCII form. This ASCII form of the IDN is called Punycode, which will appear as a random string of characters prefixed by xn--. This Punycode can then be looked up at the TLD nameserver to determine the location of the website.

 

HOW DO I REGISTER IDNs

Not all domain registrars support IDNs. For the main TLDs the most used registrar services are dynadot, domainsite, enom, among other. For ccTLDs you will have to find local registrars for many, and it needs noting that many may only allow registering by nationals/residents of that country.
Since not all languages are represented by each TLD, it is necessary to select the language from a drop down list when registering an IDN. The registrar can then check whether or not the chosen TLD supports the chosen language (Script).

 

WHO CAN I HOST IDNs WITH?

IDNs are no different than your regular domain names, and can be host anywhere by using the punycode of the domain. As mentioned above punycode is an ASCII domain and can be used in all places that normal domains are used i.e. email, hosting, etc.
Hopefully in the close future we will see greater compatibility for IDNs, and we will be able to use the foreign language (Unicode) URLs instead of punycode.

 

WHEN ARE IDNs AVAILABLE?

IDNs have been in use for a long time already! First developed at the National University of Singapore in the Late 1990s, with IDNs being available and implemented shortly later.

 

IS THERE ANY NEED FOR IDNs?

“Isn’t English the International Language?”
Believe it or not but English is not the most widely spoken language in the world. There are only 310-380 million people in the world who are speaking English as a first language, and 199-600 million speaking it as a second language. Out of 6.6 billion, the English language speakers are definitely in the minority.
In the internet world, English users are also in the minority with 819 million (73%) non-English speaking users online, compared to 300 million (37%) English speaking users.
Also with the growth of the economies of China, India and other Asian countries, it can be expected that there were be more and more users from these non-English speaking countries.