A friend of mine, an outspoken critic of English’s dominance of the Web, decided to develop a website to promote his NGO and the cause he was fighting for. He was dead against English and didn’t want to use the language at all in his website. Emboldened by the dynamic font technology and localization techniques, he went on to write content for his website. Everything was going his way, but when he decided to register a domain name for the website, he was stumbled upon the Queen’s language. The domain name had to be registered in English as it was the only way of doing so three-four years ago. The idea of hosting a website ‘to fight the dominance of English’ in English, didn’t find favour with him and he dropped the project altogether.

Since that time, World Wide Web has come a long way. You are no longer dependent on ASCII (Englisht text) for registering your domain names. With the introduction and subsequent success of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), you can now register a domain name for your website in any language of the world. In fact, you can also club names in two-three different languages, such as www.हिन्दुस्तानी.com. This is another milestone in the journey of the World Wide Web towards really becoming ‘world ready.’

Companies such as Verisign.com, AllDomains.com, Innerwise.com, Dynadot.com and DotEarth.com are offering domain registrations in over 350 world languages. India too, is moving towards making its .in domain extension compatible with the IDN standards. For the beginning, the Indian government is planning to allow registration of Hindi and Tamil domain names with .in extension.

As verisign puts it, “Computer users around the world have adapted to using computer keyboards to input scripts in their language. They use different keyboards, soft keyboards or have operating systems that facilitate the input of the scripts. IDNs use the Unicode universal character set to register and resolve script differences to simplify native language navigation.”

IDNs must be decoded from Unicode to what is known as Punycode and vice versa in order to resolve and show websites. This is because the Internet can presently only resolve ASCII (English) characters. Punycode is an ASCII compatible encoding specifically for use with IDNs. You can tell this type of domain coding by its "xn--" beginning. An example of a Punycode domain name is www.xn--21bm4l.com. The Unicode IDN version of this would be खोज.com. You can translate/convert Punycode into Unicode and vice versa using an IDN converter.

The conversion of the Unicode IDN to Punycode and back is presently handled by the web browser. Browsers that support IDNs include IE7, Firefox, Opera and Netscape. Verisign also offers a plugin (the i-nav plug-in) which can be downloaded to enable a non IDN compliant browser to resolve IDN domain names and e-mail. In addition to one needing an enabled browser or plug-in in order for IDN domains to resolve, a computer must also have the necessary scripts and fonts installed so the browser can render the various characters required for a given language. Many languages and scripts are installed by default in Windows however one can add more via the control panel. From the regional language area, one can select add languages, and then add support for more languages.

Introduction of IDNs is bound to increase the number of Internet users who are not familiar with English. Demand for using local languages to access the Internet is on the rise due to cultural, language-related, academic and practical reasons. Such domain names are easier to memorize, understand and type. It has also opened doors of opportunities to register domain names that you missed, in your own language. However, you can register domain names with .com, .net, .org and .info extensions in any Indian language through registrars dealing in IDNs. Not to be left behind, I too have registered domain names such as www.इन्डिया.com and www.अंतरजाल.com. I don’t think I would ever have been able to register their English counterparts, i.e. www.india.com and www.internet.com . May be my domain names will reap some benefits in future.

So, if you missed registering an apt domain name for your website, it may still not be so late after all. You still have a chance to claim the name in your own local language.