ICANN wants every Internet user to help in testing Internationalized (non ASCII) Domain Names as part of an evaluation program being launched on October 15, 2007.
"The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language." In ICANN's own words, it's time to end the Internet's "English alphabet characters" only rule.
By allowing users to type non-ASCII characters (accented or Cyrillic letters for example), Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) have been "engineered" to do just that. But their implementation raises all sorts of technical difficulties for an Internet initially meant only for a few select scientists to share files.
Working to overcome the problems posed by IDNs, ICANN okayed a test phase whereby 11 versions of the Internet extension .TEST have been activated.
The different versions are for the 11 test languages chosen to check if IDNs really can be intergrated in today's Internet: >: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.
Testing the limits of IDNs
Starting October 15, 2007, special pages will become reachable using the domain name example.test in any of the 11 test languages.
"People will be able to have their own name, in their own language, as a sub-page of these test pages," ICANN Media adviser Jason Keenan explained to Domaines.Info. "Each of the 11 versions of example.test will be fully translated and take the user to a wiki page explaining what is going on during the current IDN evaluation phase. They will also be able to set up their own wiki page in their own language, something like example.test/myname to help us test this controlled IDN application fully."
"This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names," said ICANN CEO Paul Twomey. "This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created. 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.
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."
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