[ispcp] [ SECRETARIAT ] IDN Testing Goes Live [ from gNSO Secretariat ]

[Mark McFadden - ISPCP Secretariat]

My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live ICANN launches global
test of Internationalized Domain Names

 

http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm

 

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: Internet users around the globe can now experiment
with their name in their language on their Internet with today's launch of
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers live testing of
Internationalized Domain Names in 11 languages.

 

"This is one of the most exciting times yet in the development of IDNs," 

said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN's President and CEO. "Internet users who speak
the 11 languages of the test can play a key role in testing how IDNs
operate, and help us move toward full implementation for all the languages
of the world."

 

Internet users around the globe can now to access wiki pages with the domain
name example.test in the 11 test languages -- Arabic, Persian, Chinese
(simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish,
Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their
own subpages with their own names in their own language

-- one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

 

ICANN has also put a video explaining the evaluation process on YouTube, and
available on the ICANN website.

 

The wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of
one of the 11 languages, or by going to http://idn.icann.org.

 

"These wikipages are key to the test. We want to know how the URL displays
in the Internet browser, if it works when you cut and paste it into the body
of an email to a friend, and how all of this impacts the root zone," Dr
Twomey added.

 

The 11 evaluation wikis will remain online until IDNs are fully implemented
and the first top-level domain is introduced in the evaluation language.

 

The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a
domain name in the characters used to write their own language. 

Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net,
.org and the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs
will change this so that literally tens of thousands of characters will be
available to the world.

 

The "example.test" labels with the associated scripts, the languages that
were used for translation of the two terms "example" and "test", and the
A-labels for second and top level that are inserted in the IDN TLD zones and
DNS respectively.

 

Enjoy the videos!

 

Mark McFadden

Secretariat, ISPCP Constituency

mcfadden at ispcp.info

 

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