The interenet regulator ICANN has now allowed web addresses to be in non-Latin characters – such as Chinese, Arabic, Hindi or Russian Cyrillic script. The first of these Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs) is thought to be up and running by the middle of next year.

This is quite exciting and interesting although all web addresses will still need "http://" at the beggining. It is being billed as one of the biggest changes to the interenet in the last 15 years.

The Internet had its 40th Birthday yesterday.

"Of the 1.6 billion users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom said at the opening of Icann's conference in Seoul, South Korea, this week. The conference approved the change today, its last day, following more than nine years of work and two years of testing.

"It's more incremental [than previous changes] but it's the single biggest change in 10 or 15 years," Beckstrom said. "It's about making the internet more global and more accessible. One world, one internet."

I think this will make browsing and learning Chinese that little bit more interesting. What are your thoughts?

- Will English people have trouble browsing the emerging populations of China & India's web presence if web addresses are in their languages?

IT Pro make an interesting point about piracy across the language barrier...

News Source : Guardian
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