Internationalized Top-level Domains (TLDs) are Internet addresses written in languages that do not use the latin (e.g. English) alphabet. For example, Chinese and Arabic TLDs would be “internationalized”. Associated Press (AP) reports that ICANN will be announcing a new system for developers to test support for internationalized TLDs in mid-October.

At this point, I would suspect that there are far more non-English speakers using the Web than English speakers due to adoption in India and China. There has been a long-running concern over how domain names (i.e. DNS: non-numeric Internet addresses) might be made more usable by people (and systems) that do not primarily speak English. For example, the goal is to allow a native Japanese, Chinese, or Arabic speaker to type a website address into their browser using the script that they are used to, and not have to use an English or “romanized” equivalent (e.g. pin-yin for Chinese speakers).

Part of the problem is that the all DNS names must be processed by the so-called “root level” DNS servers, and these servers currently handle latin characters only. ICANN propose to use an encoding scheme called Punycode to convert internationalized domain names to latin characters so that the root-level servers can process them. Users would type domain names in the manner that they expect to, and the servers would take care of the translation transparently.

During the test people, people will be able create websites to test the handling of Internationalized domain names but will not be able to register new domain names. A great deal of the testing will concern how existing software handles the internationalized domains. This includes popular and specialized browsers, but also a great deal of server-side software that most users are not aware of (e.g. DNS resolvers, proxy servers, and more).