Internationalized domain name
Encyclopedia
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
domain name
Domain name
A domain name is an identification string that defines a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control in the Internet. Domain names are formed by the rules and procedures of the Domain Name System ....
that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
, such as Arabic, Chinese
Chinese character
Chinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
or the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
-based characters with diacritics
Diacritics
diacritics is a quarterly academic journal established in 1971 at Cornell University and published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Articles serve to review recent literature in the field of literary criticism, and have covered topics in gender studies, political theory, psychoanalysis, queer...
, such as French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. These writing system
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
s are encoded by computers in multi-byte
Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information in computing and telecommunications that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, a byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the basic addressable element in many computer...
Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
as ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
strings using Punycode
Punycode
In computing, Punycode is an instance of a general encoding syntax by which a string of Unicode characters is transformed uniquely and reversibly into a smaller, restricted character set....
transcription.
The Domain Name System
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
, which performs a lookup service to translate user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted in practice to the use of ASCII characters, a practical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names. The internationalization of domain names is a technical solution to translate names written in language-native scripts into an ASCII text representation that is compatible with the Domain Name System. Internationalized domain names can only be used with applications that are specifically designed for such use, and they require no changes in the infrastructure of the Internet.
IDN was originally proposed in December 1996 by Martin Dürst and implemented in 1998 by Tan Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong under the guidance of T.W. Tan. After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as a standard, and has been implemented in several top-level domain
Top-level domain
A top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...
s.
In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm (see below) can be successfully applied. In March 2008, the IETF formed a new IDN working group to update the current IDNA protocol.
In October 2009, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
(ICANN) approved the creation of internationalized country code top-level domains (IDN ccTLDs) in the Internet that use the IDNA standard for native language scripts. In May 2010 the first IDN ccTLD were installed in the DNS root zone
DNS root zone
A DNS root zone is the top-level DNS zone in a Domain Name System hierarchy. Most commonly it refers to the root zone of the largest global DNS, deployed for the Internet. Ultimate authority over the DNS root zone rests with the US Department of Commerce NTIA...
.
Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications
Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-ASCIIASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
characters. These names either are Latin letters with diacritics (ñ
Ñ
Ñ is a letter of the modern Latin alphabet, formed by an N with a diacritical tilde. It is used in the Spanish alphabet, Galician alphabet, Asturian alphabet, Basque alphabet, Aragonese old alphabet , Filipino alphabet, Chamorro alphabet and the Guarani alphabet, where it represents...
, é
É
is a letter of the Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Kashubian, Luxembourgish, Slovak, and Catalan, Danish, English, French, Galician, Irish, Italian, Occitan, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Vietnamese language as a variant of the letter “e”...
) or are written in languages or scripts which do not use the Latin alphabet: Arabic, Hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
, Hiragana
Hiragana
is a Japanese syllabary, one basic component of the Japanese writing system, along with katakana, kanji, and the Latin alphabet . Hiragana and katakana are both kana systems, in which each character represents one mora...
and Kanji
Kanji
Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters hanzi that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana , katakana , Indo Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet...
for instance.
Although the Domain Name System
Domain name system
The Domain Name System is a hierarchical distributed naming system for computers, services, or any resource connected to the Internet or a private network. It associates various information with domain names assigned to each of the participating entities...
supports non-ASCII characters, applications such as e-mail
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
and web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s restrict the characters which can be used as domain names for purposes such as a hostname
Hostname
A hostname is a label that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network and that is used to identify the device in various forms of electronic communication such as the World Wide Web, e-mail or Usenet...
. Strictly speaking it is the network protocols these applications use that have restrictions on the characters which can be used in domain names, not the applications that have these limitations or the DNS itself. To retain backwards 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 browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s and other user applications. IDNA specifies how this conversion between names written in non-ASCII characters and their ASCII-based representation is performed.
An IDNA-enabled application is able to convert between the internationalized and ASCII representations of a domain name. It uses the ASCII form for DNS lookups but can present the internationalized form to users who presumably prefer to read and write domain names in non-ASCII scripts such as Arabic or Hiragana. Applications that do not support IDNA will not be able to handle domain names with non-ASCII characters, but will still be able to access such domains if given the (usually rather cryptic) ASCII equivalent.
ICANN
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
issued guidelines for the use of IDNA in June 2003, and it was already possible to register .jp
.jp
.jp is the Internet country code top-level domain for Japan. It is administered by the Japan Registry Service.At the establishment of the .jp domain the domain was administered by the JPNIC, as part of their role as an overseeing technical body for the Internet in Japan...
domains using this system in July 2003 and .info
.info
The domain name info is a generic top-level domain in the Domain Name System of the Internet, The name is derived from information indicating that the domain is intended for informative Internet resources, although registration requirements do not prescribe any theme orientation.The info TLD was...
domains in March 2004. Several other top-level domain registries started accepting registrations in 2004 and 2005. IDN Guidelines were first created in June 2003, and have been updated to respond to phishing
Phishing
Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT...
concerns in November 2005. An ICANN working group focused on country code domain names at the top level was formed in November 2007 and promoted jointly by the country code supporting organization and the Governmental Advisory Committee.
Mozilla
Mozilla Application Suite
The Mozilla Application Suite is a cross-platform integrated Internet suite. Its development was initiated by Netscape Communications Corporation, before their acquisition by AOL. It is based on the source code of Netscape Communicator...
1.4, Netscape
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
7.1, Opera
Opera (web browser)
Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent,...
7.11 were among the first applications to support IDNA. A browser plugin is available for Internet Explorer 6 to provide IDN support. Internet Explorer 7.0 and Windows Vista
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is an operating system released in several variations developed by Microsoft for use on personal computers, including home and business desktops, laptops, tablet PCs, and media center PCs...
's URL APIs provide native support for IDN.
ToASCII and ToUnicode
The conversions between ASCII and non-ASCII forms of a domain name are accomplished by algorithms called ToASCII and ToUnicode. These algorithms are not applied to the domain name as a whole, but rather to individual labels. For example, if the domain name is www.example.com, then the labels are www, example, and com. ToASCII or ToUnicode are applied to each of these three separately.The details of these two algorithms are complex, and are specified in RFC 3490. The following gives an overview of their function.
ToASCII leaves unchanged any ASCII label, but will fail if the label is unsuitable for the Domain Name System.
If given a label containing at least one non-ASCII character, ToASCII will apply the Nameprep
Nameprep
Nameprep is the process of case-folding to lowercase and removal of some generally invisible code points before it is suitable to represent a domain name, or other such canonical name...
algorithm, which converts the label to lowercase and performs other normalization, and will then translate the result to ASCII using Punycode
Punycode
In computing, Punycode is an instance of a general encoding syntax by which a string of Unicode characters is transformed uniquely and reversibly into a smaller, restricted character set....
before prepending the four-character string "". This four-character string is called the ASCII Compatible Encoding (ACE) prefix, and is used to distinguish Punycode encoded labels from ordinary ASCII labels.
The ToASCII algorithm can fail in several ways; for example, the final string could exceed the 63-character limit of a DNS name. A label for which ToASCII fails cannot be used in an internationalized domain name.
The function ToUnicode reverses the action of ToASCII, stripping off the ACE prefix and applying the Punycode decode algorithm. It does not reverse the Nameprep processing, since that is merely a normalization and is by nature irreversible. Unlike ToASCII, ToUnicode always succeeds, because it simply returns the original string if decoding fails. In particular, this means that ToUnicode has no effect on a string that does not begin with the ACE prefix.
Example of IDNA encoding
IDNA encoding may be illustrated using the example domain Bücher.ch. “Bücher” is GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
for “books”, and .ch
.ch
.ch is the Internet country code top-level domain for Switzerland. It is administered by SWITCH Information Technology Services.The ".ch" domain does not come from the name for Switzerland in any of its national languages; "die Schweiz", "Suisse", "Svizzera" or "Svizra"...
is the ccTLD
Country code top-level domain
A country code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, a sovereign state, or a dependent territory....
of Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
. This domain name has two labels, Bücher and ch. The second label is pure ASCII, and is left unchanged. The first label is processed by Nameprep to give bücher, and then converted to Punycode to result in bcher-kva. It is then prepended with to produce bcher-kva. The resulting label suitable for use in the DNS is therefore bcher-kva.ch.
Top-level domain implementation
In 2009, ICANN decided to implement a new class of top-level domains, assignable to countries and independent regions, similar to the rules for country code top-level domains. 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.The process of installing IDN country code domains began with a long period of testing in a set of subdomains in the test
.test
The name test is reserved by the Internet Engineering Task Force in RFC 2606 as a domain name that is not intended to be installed as a top-level domain in the global Domain Name System of the Internet for production use....
top-level domain. Eleven domains used language-native scripts or alphabets, such as δοκιμή, 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.
In the Domain Name System, these domains use an ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...
representation consisting of the prefix xn-- followed by the Punycode
Punycode
In computing, Punycode is an instance of a general encoding syntax by which a string of Unicode characters is transformed uniquely and reversibly into a smaller, restricted character set....
translation of the Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
representation of the language-specific alphabet or script glyphs. For example, the Cyrillic name of Russia's IDN ccTLD is рф. In Punycode representation, this is plai, and its DNS name is xn--plai.
Non-IDNA or non-ICANN registries that support non-ASCII domain names
There are other registries that support non-ASCII domain names. The company ThaiURL.com in Thailand supports .com registrations via its own modified domain name system, ThaiURLThaiURL
ThaiURL is a technology enabling the use of Thai domain names in applications that have been modified to support this technology.It is one of several such systems that were marketed before the advent of IDNA....
. Because these companies, and other organizations that offer modified DNS systems, do not subject themselves to ICANN
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
's control, they must be regarded as alternate DNS roots. Domains registered with them will therefore not be supported by most Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s, and as a result most users will not be able to look up such domains without manually configuring their computers to use the alternate DNS.
ASCII spoofing concerns
The use of Unicode in domain names makes it potentially easier to spoofSpoofing attack
In the context of network security, a spoofing attack is a situation in which one person or program successfully masquerades as another by falsifying data and thereby gaining an illegitimate advantage.- Spoofing and TCP/IP :...
web sites visited by World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
users as the visual representation of an IDN string in a web browser may appear identical to another, depending on the font used. For example, Unicode character U+0430, Cyrillic small letter a
A (Cyrillic)
A is a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet.It commonly represents an open front unrounded vowel , like the pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ in "father".The Cyrillic letter A is romanized using the Latin letter A.-History:...
, can look identical to Unicode character U+0061, Latin small letter a, used in English.
Top-level domains accepting IDN registration
Many top-level domains have started to accept domain name registrations at the second or lower levels.DotAsia, the registrar for the TLD asia
.asia
.asia is a sponsored top-level domain sponsored by the DotAsia Organization, with the back-end registry operated by Afilias. It was approved by ICANN on 19 October 2006 as a sponsored TLD...
, conducted a 70-day sunrise period starting May 11, 2011 for second-level domain registrations in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts.
Timeline
- 1996-12: Martin Dürst's original Internet Draft proposing UTF5 (the first example of what is known today as an ASCII-compatible encoding (ACE)) – UTF-5 was first defined by Martin Dürst at the University of Zürich
- 1998-03: Early Research on IDN at National University of Singapore (NUS), Center for Internet Research (formerly Internet Research and Development Unit – IRDU) led by Prof. Tan Tin Wee (IDN Project team – Lim Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong) and subsequently continued under a team at Bioinformatrix Pte. Ltd. (BIX Pte. Ltd.) – an NUS spin-off company led by Prof. S. Subbiah.
- 1998-07: Geneva INET'98 conference with a BoF discussion on iDNS and APNG General Meeting and Working Group meeting.
- 1998-07: Asia Pacific Networking Group (APNG, now still in existence and distinct from a gathering known as APSTAR) iDNS Working Group formed.
- 1998-10: James SengJames SengSeng Ching Hong is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is recognized as an international expert in the Internet arena. He gave regular speeches at various forums on several Internet issues such as IDN, VoIP, IPv6, spam, OSS and Internet governance issues...
was recruited to lead further IDN development at BIX Pte. Ltd. by Prof. S. Subbiah. - 1999-02: iDNS Testbed launched by BIX Pte. Ltd. under the auspices of APNG with participation from CNNIC, JPNICJapan Network Information CenterThe Japan Network Information Center is the National Internet Registry in Japan that manages several aspects of Internet operations, including the allocation of IP addresses and AS numbers....
, KRNIC, TWNIC, THNIC, HKNIC and SGNIC led by James SengJames SengSeng Ching Hong is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is recognized as an international expert in the Internet arena. He gave regular speeches at various forums on several Internet issues such as IDN, VoIP, IPv6, spam, OSS and Internet governance issues... - 1999-02: Presentation of Report on IDN at Joint APNG-APTLD meeting, at APRICOT'99
- 1999-03: Endorsement of the IDN Report at APNG General Meeting 1 March 1999.
- 1999-06: Grant application by APNG jointly with the Centre for Internet Research (CIR), National University of Singapore, to the International Development Research Center (IDRC), a Canadian Government funded international organisation to work on IDN for IPv6. This APNG Project was funded under the Pan Asia R&D Grant administered on behalf of IDRC by the Canadian Committee on Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS). Principal Investigator: Tan Tin Wee of National University of Singapore.
- 1999-07 Tout, Walid R. (WALID Inc.) Filed IDNA patent application number US1999000358043 Method and system for internationalizing domain names. Published 2001-01-30
- 1999-07: Internet Draft on UTF5 by James Seng, Martin Dürst and Tan Tin Wee. Renewed 2000.
- 1999-08: APTLD and APNG forms a working groupWorking groupA working group is an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers working on new research activities that would be difficult to develop under traditional funding mechanisms . The lifespan of the WG can last anywhere between a few months and several years...
to look into IDN issues chaired by Kilnam Chon. - 1999-10: BIX Pte. Ltd. and National University of Singapore together with New York Venture Capital investors, General Atlantic Partners, spun off the IDN effort into 2 new Singapore companies – i-DNS.net International Inc. and i-Email.net Pte. Ltd. that created the first commercial implementation of an IDN Solution for both domain names and IDN email addresses respectively.
- 1999-11: IETF IDN Birds-of-Feather in Washington was initiated by i-DNS.net at the request of IETF officials.
- 1999-12: i-DNS.net InternationalPte. Ltd. launched the first commercial IDN. It was in TaiwanTaiwanTaiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...
and in Chinese characterChinese characterChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
s under the top-level IDN TLD ".gongsi" (meaning loosely ".com") with endorsement by the Minister of Communications of Taiwan and some major Taiwanese ISPs with reports of over 200 000 names sold in a week in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, ChinaPeople's Republic of ChinaChina , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
, Australia and USA. - Late 1999: Kilnam Chon initiates Task Force on IDNS which led to formation of MINC, the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium.
- 2000-01: IETF IDN Working Group formed chaired by James SengJames SengSeng Ching Hong is one of the Internet pioneers in Singapore and is recognized as an international expert in the Internet arena. He gave regular speeches at various forums on several Internet issues such as IDN, VoIP, IPv6, spam, OSS and Internet governance issues...
and Marc Blanchet - 2000-01: The second ever commercial IDN launch was IDN TLDs in the Tamil Language, corresponding to .com, .net, .org, and .edu. These were launched in India with IT Ministry support by i-DNS.net International.
- 2000-02: Multilingual Internet Names Consortium(MINC) Proposal BoF at IETF Adelaide.
- 2000-03: APRICOT 2000 Multilingual DNS session.
- 2000-04: WALID Inc. (with IDNA patent pending application 6182148) started Registration & Resolving Multilingual Domain Names.
- 2000-05: Interoperability Testing WG, MINC meeting. San Francisco, chaired by Bill Manning and Y. Yoneya 12 May 2000.
- 2000-06: Inaugural Launch of the Multilingual Internet Names Consortium (MINC) in Seoul to drive the collaborative roll-out of IDN starting from the Asia Pacific.
- 2000-07: Joint Engineering TaskForce (JET) initiated in Yokohama to study technical issues led by JPNIC (K.Konishi)
- 2000-07: Official Formation of CDNC Chinese Domain Name ConsortiumChinese Domain Name ConsortiumThe Chinese Domain Name Consortium, created in 19 May 2000, is a collaboration among the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China , Hong Kong and Macau to come up with a standard way to create a domain name system for Chinese characters....
to resolve issues related to and to deploy Han Character domain names, founded by CNNIC, TWNIC, HKNIC and MONICMonicIn mathematics, monic can refer to*monic morphism - a special kind of morphism in category theory.*monic polynomial - a polynomial whose leading coefficient is one.In linguistics, monic can refer to*Monic languages...
in May 2000. - 2001-03: ICANNICANNThe Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
Board IDN Working Group formed - 2001-07: Japanese Domain Name Association : JDNA Launch Ceremony (July 13, 2001) in Tokyo, Japan.
- 2001-07: Urdu Internet Names System (July 28, 2001) in Islamabad, Pakistan, Organised Jointly by SDNP and MINC.
- 2001-07: Presentation on IDN to the Committee Meeting of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Academies USA (JULY 11–13, 2001) at University of California School of Information Management and Systems, Berkeley, CA.
- 2001-08: MINC presentation and outreach at the Asia Pacific Advanced Network annual conference, Penang, Malaysia 20 August 2001
- 2001-10: Joint MINC-CDNC Meeting in Beijing 18–20 October 2001
- 2001-11: ICANNICANNThe Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is a non-profit corporation headquartered in Marina del Rey, California, United States, that was created on September 18, 1998, and incorporated on September 30, 1998 to oversee a number of Internet-related tasks previously performed directly...
IDN Committee formed - 2001-12: Joint ITU-WIPO Symposium on Multilingual Domain Names organised in association with MINC, 6–7 Dec 2001, International Conference Center, Geneva.
- 2003-01: Free implementation of StringPrep, Punycode, and IDNA release in GNU Libidn.
- 2003-03: Publication of RFC 3454, RFC 3490, RFC 3491 and RFC 3492
- 2003-06: Publication of ICANN IDN Guidelines for registries Adopted by .cn, .info, .jp, .org, and .tw registries.
- 2004-05: Publication of RFC 3743, Joint Engineering Team (JET) Guidelines for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) Registration and Administration for ChineseChinese characterChinese characters are logograms used in the writing of Chinese and Japanese , less frequently Korean , formerly Vietnamese , or other languages...
, Japanese, and Korean - 2005-03: First Study Group 17 of ITU-T meeting on Internationalized Domain Names.
- 2005-05: .IN ccTLD (India) creates expert IDN Working Group to create solutions for 22 official languages
- 2006-04: ITU Study Group 17 meeting in Korea gave final approval to the Question on Internationalized Domain Names.
- 2006-06: Workshop on IDN at ICANN meeting at Marrakech, Morocco
- 2006-11: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group created to discuss policy implications of IDN TLDs. Ram MohanRam MohanRam Mohan is a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division, Government of India in 1956...
elected Chair of the IDN Working Group. - 2006-12: ICANN meeting at São Paulo discusses status of lab tests of IDNs within the root.
- 2007-01: Tamil and Malayalam variant table work completed by India's C-DAC and AfiliasAfiliasAfilias Limited is the registry operator of the .info and .mobi Top-level domain, and the service provider of the .org generic top-level domain , .asia TLD catering to the Asia, Australia, and Pacific regions, .aero Airline and Aviation Industry TLD, and a provider of domain name registry services...
- 2007-03: ICANN GNSO IDN Working Group completes work, Ram MohanRam MohanRam Mohan is a veteran in the Indian animation industry, who started his career at the Cartoon Films Unit, Films Division, Government of India in 1956...
presents report at ICANN Lisboa meeting. - 2007-10: Eleven IDNA top-level domainTop-level domainA top-level domain is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in lower levels, it is the last part of the domain name, that is, the last label of a...
s were added to the root nameserverRoot nameserverA root name server is a name server for the Domain Name System's root zone. It directly answers requests for records in the root zone and answers other requests returning a list of the designated authoritative name servers for the appropriate top-level domain...
s in order to evaluate the use of IDNA at the top level of the DNS. - 2008-01: ICANN: Successful Evaluations of .test IDN TLDs
- 2008-04: IETF IDNAbis WG chaired by Vint CerfVint CerfVinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with American computer scientist Bob Kahn...
continues the work to update IDNA - 2008-06: ICANN board votes to develop final fast-track implementation proposal for a limited number of IDN ccTLDS.
- 2008-10: ICANN Seeks Interest in IDN ccTLD Fast-Track Process
- 2009-09: ICANN puts IDN ccTLD proposal on agenda for Seoul meeting in October 2009
- 2009-10: ICANN approves the registration of IDN names in the root of the DNS through the IDN ccTLD Fast-Track process at its meeting in Seoul, Oct. 26–30, 2009.
- 2010-01: ICANN announces that Egypt, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were the first countries to have passed the Fast Track String Evaluation within the IDN ccTLD domain application process.
- 2010-05: The first implementations go live. They are the ccTLDs in the Arabic alphabet for Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
- 2010-08: The IETF publishes the updated "IDNA2008" specifications as RFCRequest for CommentsIn computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.Through the Internet Society, engineers and...
5890 - 5894
External links
- RFC 3454 "Preparation of Internationalized Strings ('stringprep')"
- RFC 5890 "Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA): Definitions and Document Framework"
- RFC 5891 "Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA): Protocol"
- RFC 5892 "The Unicode Code Points and Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)"
- RFC 5893 "Right-to-Left Scripts for Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)"
- ICANN Internationalized Domain Names.
- IDN Language Table Registry
- Unicode Technical Report #36 - Security Considerations for the Implementation of Unicode and Related Technology
- IDNA converter
- domain name exploration tool that works with all IDNs