Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names in local language characters. They have been specifically designed to transform the Internet into a truly global and multilingual tool by enabling Internet users to navigate, surf, work and play in their native languages. This will massively enhance the navigation experience of most Non-English Speakers.
The importance of IDNs is not only can they be typed-in to the address bar of enable browsers, and with the release of IE7 the problems of browser support will no longer exist, but because they are already recognized by the major search engine, they will yield a phenomenal SEO advantage for the local character keywords that make up the overwhelming majority of the all the search terms used in the world.
IDNs will enable Businesses to develop online identity in local markets for effective marketing around the world.
They will improve the targeting of these markets with local branding using the customers' preferred language and script, and then reinforce this with synchronization in Website URLs.
IDNs are constructed from an extended character set called Unicode. As the DNS only supports the numerical and alphabetic Latin character set together with hyphen, Punycode enciphering is used to produce unique character strings that can be resolved by the DNS. At present, because of the domains are in the early stage of adoption, many systems will only support the Punycode form. Eventually, however, much like our own character sets, which are represented in various forms of machine code all the way down to binary, this encoding will be a matter purely for the techies and these domains will be treated in exactly the same way as the ASCII domains with which we are all familiar.
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10-03-2006, 10:22 PM
IDN - A brief explanation
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