IDNs (www.بالعربي.eg)

IDNs or Internationalized Domain Names are domain names represented by local language characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-ASCII scripts (for example, Arabic or Chinese).

Last Friday Oct. 30 2009 ICANN (the organization responsible for managing assighnment of domain names) approved non-latin domain names, it is designed to accept local alphabet characters, it is considered as biggest technical change to the internet since its birth 40 years ago.

This change will allow URLs to be writen in native characters such as Arabic, Chinese, Greek, etc... and that should allow people who do not read/wirte english to use there own language to surf the cyberspace.

Initially, the change will apply for local country codes only, such as (.kr for korea, .eg for egyypt, etc...) the Major Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net and .org will not see non-latine charachters but it will one day.

It is really intereseted to have your native language characters in the URLs although it will raise new development issues to to include non-latin characters in the URLs (from developer point of view :))

looking forward www.بالعربي.eg