Devanagari (Hindi) in your domain names

Fri Oct 30 00:00:00 IST 2009, by Abhishek Mehta

History has been made today in the world of Internet. ICANN, The body in charge of assigning online addresses, on Friday said, "We had agreed to allow the use of any of the world's scripts, no longer just the Latin alphabet". "This is only the first step, but it is an incredibly big one and an historic move toward the internationalization of the Internet," ICANN's President and CEO Rod Beckstrom was quoted as saying.

This is not transliteration. In Simple words, domain names can be booked in characters (some or all) like in Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Cyrillic and many more languages. Have a look at the image above to feel the future domain names, in Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telgu, and Kannada (replica: abhishekmehta.com).

This is a welcome move, and will provide respite over the Internet domain name scarcity. Required testing have been finished at ICANN labs, overcoming the technical issues, if there were any, one can expect first such name to be rolling out sometime middle of 2010. Nevertheless, overall implementation of the same is going to be tedious tasks, there are operational and compatibility issues to be addressed before we declare ourselves ready for this change.

One of such compatibility issue is about software applications. Like email clients: which do not support anything except Latin characters as sender or receiver email address. See the image (left) to accommodate new email addresses in your applications. New wave of investments has to be made in old software applications to accommodate these changes.

Some scripts have huge overlap and hence, lots of domain names can be exactly similar. As Tulika Pandey, additional director, C-DAC has said, "Even as we try and introduce IDNs (international domain names) in Indian languages, there are several issues that need to be resolved, especially issues arising out of the complexity of Indian scripts. For example, once we roll out Indian language IDNs, there will be occasions when it will not be possible to make out the difference between Hindi and Marathi, or for matter any languages in Devanagari scripts." ***

Newer languages will exaggerate regional coupling of Internet, computers (operating system/keyboards) and browsers. Someone tightly coupled to Arabic will have tough time gaining valuable information from a site hosted with Hindi name, as typing Hindi domain name will be a mess for him. {Have to map characters visually or have to use transliteration to get the website}

Abhishekmehta.com will be written in Hindi as shown in the top most image but in Devanagari character "." (dot) has no use. It acts as the connector part of abhishekmehta and com. Similar problem will be encountered in other languages where "." will be keeping mandatory stay on the keyboard just like "@". This is a small limitation to live with, but certainly worth mentioning.

This move by ICANN means more revenue for domain registrars and more investments for companies. Companies have to protect their online brand image in local languages also (More..). Domain hoarders have yet another opportunity to jack the regional domain prices by illegal hoarding of domain names ( More..)

Half of cyber world is non-English by choice or chance. They deserve better for their domain names, email addresses and social network contacts. This move by ICANN is spot on.

Reference:

*** Now, type internet URLs in your own language

Posted at 12:00AM Oct 30, 2009 by ABhi in Trends  |  Comments[2]