Internationalized domain name

The DNS, which performs a lookup service to translate mostly user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted in practice[c] to the use of ASCII characters, a practical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names.

In April 2008, UN-ESCWA together with the Public Interest Registry (PIR) and Afilias launched the Arabic Script in IDNs Working Group (ASIWG), which comprised experts in DNS, ccTLD operators, business, academia, as well as members of regional and international organizations.

[citation needed] To retain backward compatibility with the installed base, the IETF IDNA Working Group decided that internationalized domain names should be converted to a suitable ASCII-based form that could be handled by web browsers and other user applications.

[citation needed] IDNA specifies how this conversion between names written in non-ASCII characters and their ASCII-based representation is performed.

[citation needed] An IDNA-enabled application can convert between the internationalized and ASCII representations of a domain name.

An ICANN working group focused on country-code domain names at the top level was formed in November 2007[12] and promoted jointly by the country code supporting organization and the Governmental Advisory Committee.

Additionally, ICANN supports the community-led Universal Acceptance Steering Group, which seeks to promote the usability of IDNs and other new gTLDS in all applications, devices, and systems.

Internet Explorer 7.0[14] and Windows Vista's URL APIs provide native support for IDN.

[15] The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by a pair of algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode.

The function ToUnicode reverses the action of ToASCII, stripping off the ACE prefix and applying the Punycode decode algorithm.

Unlike ToASCII, ToUnicode always succeeds, because it simply returns the original string if decoding fails.

However, the domain names may be any desirable string of characters, symbols, or glyphs in the language-specific, non-Latin alphabet or script of the applicant's language, within certain guidelines to assure sufficient visual uniqueness.

Eleven domains used language-native scripts or alphabets, such as "δοκιμή",[19] meaning test in Greek.

These efforts culminated in the creation of the first internationalized country code top-level domains (IDN ccTLDs) for production use in 2010.

However, since most modern browsers only recognize IDNA/Punycode IDNs, ThaiURL-encoded domains must be typed in or linked to in their encoded form, and they will be displayed thus in the address bar.

[20] DotAsia, the registrar for the TLD Asia, conducted a 70-day sunrise period starting May 11, 2011 for second-level domain registrations in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts.