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Britain’s multi-cultural mix has prompted Nominet, the organisation housing website addresses ending in ‘.uk,’ to launch a public consultation over plans to adopt international domain names (IDN). The move intends to clear a pathway online for website owners to set up addresses using native languages that would include accents and foreign alphabets. It would improve the current system that already lets users read text from languages across the globe, but would end the era of websites having to use the 26-letter Latin alphabet with hyphens and digits 0 to 9. The consultation period of three months could end up making the UK go further than other countries by shaping domestic URLs to include more than just the quirks of foreign languages. In other words, UK site owners could soon be empowered - not just to include individual characters like in the URL -www.café.co.uk, but also to fuse a wide variety of foreign languages into the domain of a British site. “We are asking everyone in the UK what they want," said Edward Philips, Company Solicitor. “We have Welsh and Gaelic, which require some additional characters, but when you start looking across the country you realise there is a huge range of languages spoken here. Should we open it up to absolutely everybody?” Experts at Warwick University have commented how the move to diversify URLs could sound the death knell for English language as the primary code of communication on the Internet. Technology experts and scientists working at the net’s birth were primarily English-speakers, while the explosion of American business online, coinciding with an expanding Microsoft, seems to have cemented a linguistic monopoly. Yet academics say that the opening up of domestic URLs to include other people’s language, whether Chinese, Russian or Gaelic, can only have a positive effect. In particular, they pointed out the low level of foreign language literacy from UK users could become less of an acute problem. There is also a school of thought emerging in society that says people increasingly see themselves as both British and from a member of a separate ethnic background, according to Warwick University. Nominet appears to be onto this trend. They say that if there is a sufficient demand over the next three months then ethnic communities could set up an address in their own language that ends in the ‘.uk’ suffix. But Nominet told CUK that the motivation behind the move is not confined to Britain’s multi-cultural mix. “This arises because the underlying technology to do this has recently been agreed, and Nominet is interested to know whether we should introduce it,” said Mr Philips “It has potential benefits for indigenous British users, such as Gaelic, just as much as the new multicultural mix. Having said that, the potential is wider, given the ethnic mix we have in the UK.” They added that under IDN, it would be technically possible for a Chinese businessman to set up a web address that includes both native and English language. However this depends on the outcome of the consultation process, Nominet said, and will ultimately determine whether the service will become available in the UK. It’s thought the move can be implemented without an overhaul of the Internet or heavy investment, as the IDN network would leave the underlying registration system undisturbed. The move comes just weeks after sex sites were offered their own ‘.xxx’ net domain as a type of virtual red-light district by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The IDN network will not carry a unique identifier but will be recognisable by certain characters. “There are no plans for a special identifier that the user sees,” Nominet said in a statement. “In the consultation document we give examples like cafe.co.uk, but with the acute on the 'e' - and these look just the same as 'normal' domain names. At a technical level, all IDN start 'xn--' but [less technical] users may not notice this.” Nominet provided CUK with a first glance into international domain names: àlacarte.co.uk adiós.co.uk apéritif.co.uk après-ski.co.uk château.co.uk déjàvu.co.uk olé.co.uk tête-à-tête.co.uk touché.co.uk visàvis.co.uk voilà.co.uk All internet users should contribute their views to the consultation by following the link on: www.nominet.org.uk Jun 22, 2005 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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