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International domains set to go
March 28, 2003
INTERNET domain names in non-ASCII character sets are likely to be available within the next few weeks or months after the internet's technical policy body indicated it would approve changes to the DNS.
Vint Cerf, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said the organisation would likely approve technical standards today. The standards allow the world's computers built around English to recognize Chinese, Arabic and other languages.
"A great deal of progress has been made this week and I hope we will see progress as the weeks go by," Cerf said. "The technical standards are ready. Now the policy work has to be done."
Cerf made his comments at a weeklong ICANN meeting that ends Friday. ICANN was created by the US Commerce Department in 1998 to oversee the internet's naming and addressing systems and protocols.
The core domain name servers (DNS) computers that handle online addresses currently understand only the 26 English letters, 10 numerals and a hyphen, along with a period for splitting addresses into sections.
More details at: http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,6200711%255E15318,00.html
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