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Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE Get First Non-Latin Domains

by Matthew Zuras on May 6, 2010 at 11:05 AM

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced back in October that it had passed a resolution allowing Web addresses to be written in non-Latin alphabets. Well, you flouters of the Roman script, your day has finally arrived as the first of those sites have just gone live.

While some non-Latin characters were previously allowed in Web addresses, they always had to end with a Latin prefix (like .cn for China). Now, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have the first "country codes" written entirely in Arabic (written right to left). Scripts in Chinese, Thai, Russian and more are soon to follow. ICANN has received 21 requests for internationalized domain names (IDNs) in eleven languages.

You can check out Egypt's Ministry of Communications site here (http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر), which is among the first of the live addresses. As browser software catches up to speed with the new ICANN rules, you may see a long string of letters, hyphens and other gobbledygook in your URL bar with these new addresses -- or they might not work at all. But, since it's in the best interests of software companies to include the appropriate language packs in their browsers, we're not worried that this snafu will persist for long. [From: BBC]

Tags: DomainNames, egypt, icann, international, internet, langauge, SaudiArabia, script, top, UnitedArabEmirates, web

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