ICANN Launches International Domain Names

ICANN today finally released the Internationalized Domain Namespace which allows for the non-latin characters in languages like Farsi, Arabic and Chinese. How does it look?

But what’s going on behind the scenes? What if I don’t have these character sets on my machine or if I’m in the command line? Here’s what the URL above looks like in puny code. Punycode is an instance of a general encoding syntax (Bootstring) by which a string of Unicode characters can be transformed uniquely and reversibly into a smaller, restricted character set.

Story via GxD