IDNs, or Internationalized Domain Names, are a fairly recent development for the World Wide Web. IDNs were first proposed in 1996 and after some heated debates and a number of fumbled attempts, IDNA (Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications) was developed to be the standard.

An IDN is one that contains non-ASCII characters. ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is based on the English alphabet, containing letters a-z and numbers 0-9. The problem was that more and more people who did not speak or write English were accessing the internet and had a lot of difficulty accessing helpful sites. Even if they used a translator to read a site they would have to type in the URL in a language they weren’t familiar with. Just imagine how much trouble you would have trying to type in the web address of a site you needed if it was in Chinese and your native language was Farsi, Hindi or English! IDN addressed this difficulty and enriched the internet experience for millions of people.

There are many advantages of having an IDN. Nearly 65% of internet users are non-English speaking users making up 66% of the world economy. The implications of this are obvious for internet marketers; without international domain names, they could be losing out on more than half of their potential product market! While some of that consumer niche was struggling along with translators and some limited English knowledge, those countries whose languages were non-alphabetical such as China, Japan and the Middle East were severely restricted if they had no knowledge of English. Since there are over two hundred country-specified top level domains around the globe, that’s quite a large market to exclude. Not only do marketers miss the opportunity to present their products to this large segment of the world, non-English speaking consumers miss out on products they may want or need.

Consumers aren’t the only ones that benefit from IDNs; scholars, students and those who wish to keep up with current events around the world also reap the advantages of International Domain Names. Bloggers, libraries, newspapers and targeted interest sites such as crafts and hobbies all can take advantage of global readership. Many hobbyists take advantage of IDNs in order to make contact with others around the world that share their interests.

Many top level domains have adopted IDNs, which allow different alphabets to be used in web addresses. There was a small problem, however; not all applications could handle IDNs at first, particularly e-mail programs. Most computer users had to download a special plug-in in order to use IDNs when they first appeared. Luckily, there’s no longer any difficulty due to technical and programming developments. Similar to a regular ASCII address, an IDN can have no less than three and no more than sixty three characters.