Or how abоut ریگستان.نت ? [thanks Briandot for the Farsi Save]
Cool, right? Well, it might become a reality. Icann, the invisible hand that rules the internet, has said that there’s a shakeup in the works. Non-latin characters will be allowed in web addresses. About damn time!
“Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based,” said Rod Beckstrom at the opening of Icann’s conference in Seoul, South Korea.
“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread.”
This post was written by...
Michael Hancock-Parmer – author of 153 posts on Registan.net.
Michael earned an MA in Central Eurasian Studies in 2011 and remains a student at Indiana University pursuing a dual PhD in Russian History and Central Eurasian Studies. He served 6 months in the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan in 2005. After the events in Andijan and the subsequent closure of the program, he served 2 years in southern Kazakhstan, returning to the Midwest in 2007. His general area of interest is on post-Timur Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, centered on the Syr Darya river valley.
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I think you misspelled the Persian.
At the very least you’re missing an alef in the ‘stan’ part, and the ye may or may not be there. [checks Wikipedia...] Yeah, looks like the only ‘implied’ vowel is the short ‘i’ between the ‘reg’ and ‘stan’, which is how it is with Afghanistan as well.
رگستن.نت
Should be
ریگستان.نت
This will be an interesting development, to be sure. What is the readership from Persian speaking countries, anyway?
Without non-latin TLDs this won’t really help. Who the heck wants to switch keyboard layouts between writing the first half of a URL and the second?
@Narcogen, I agree it could be untidy, but I would ask how many people for whom latin letters are foreign wanted that keyboard layout to be mandatory in the first place?
@Briandot, you are right! I blame it on my Introductory level Farsi. If we assume it is like Afghanistan, the alefs need to be there.
Okay, whew. I was going to ask about the Farsi spelling, but I see someone’s already gotten there.
Frankly, I’m holding out for the ability to use Wingdings in a web address.
I think this will result in a limitation of information rather than an expansion of it. The internet has been a window into hard to access sites up to now. Even if I can read Arabic, that doesn’t mean it is easy for me to write it, let alone write it correctly as the above made apparent for Persian.
Yes, sure it would be nice to have every language able to to use its own script but part of the genius of the internet, in my humble opinion, is its universalness. No one is forcing the web content to be in latin script just the webpage. The muddling of the waters that will result from the changes will be negative.
josh NOT foust has a point. i have activated the arabic script on my home and work computer because i sometimes need to type in arabic. but unlocking the script was more of a pain in the ass than i thought it would be, which is why i haven’t bothered activating cyrillic. it’s hard to imagine the average computer user bothering to activate all these scripts. and if he/she doesn’t, would that mean more sites are inaccessible?
this will help access for people who speak languages with non-latin script but it might also inadvertently segregate the internet, by making it more difficult for those of us who use latin script to visit some sites.
I envision smart browsers that will give the option to type in one script and view equivalent of the just-typed-in or just-searched URL in pages with other scripts. Furthermore, voice recognition search will become more commonplace.
Thank you, shohmurod! I was waiting for someone to back me up. The Internet is the Internet, and it already IS fracturing on this very issue [Chinese Internet Shout Out!]. This is the only move that makes sense, and the software will back it up, make it more dynamic, easier to use, not the other way around. Keyboard setups are difficult because up to this point they have not been necessary… I foresee that possibly changing. I HOPE it changes soon. English might be the language of the internet, but that wasn’t a democratic decision… and in an age of free information, why not have the freedom to switch from Russian to French to Thai with the same ease as one can in one’s own handwriting. The Technology will arise – this is not rocket science. If you’re monolingual, you have nothing to lose, and if you’re multilingual, you have much to gain.
Actually, you can already (kind of) do this. Any unicode character can be used as a domain name, it just gets translated by the browsers automatically. Try this:
http://☃.net/
It’s a real site.
Similarly, you could have регистан.net already, you’d just have to register xn--80affn0anki.net.
I imagine the new proposals, of course, would be a little cleaner.
Won’t this open up a gold-rush of domain-name speculation? It’s already a big-money business in English (even if I think it’s a wholly illegitimate way to make money). This will probably create a few more billionaires and actually make information less free.