In an effort to make the World Wide Web more international and to ease the pressure on websites looking to make new domain names, a few months ago ICANN, the organization in charge of the Internet and domain names, announced plans to allow the registration of non-English-based URLs in Arabic, Cyrillic and other non-Latin alphabets. Well, the first one went live on Friday, and odds are your browser won’t display the real URL.
When I checked out the URL, the page that popped up said http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ which is unreadable gibberish. Still, the page itself, belonging to (I believe) the Egyptian Ministry of Technology works just fine. Let the online land-grab begin!
I just wonder if there will come a day in which those URLs will display in their native texts for people who aren’t using special keyboard settings to enter them in. Will I one day be clicking the above link only to find it renders in perfect Arabic letters?
Tags: Internet, websites, website names, ICANN, first non-Latin URLs introduced, non-Latin alphabets, spelling, website URLs, Egyptian Ministry of Technology, http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-rmckbbajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/