What are IDN Domains

[AMIEL]

Hello Friends,

I would like to know that what are IDN Domains? For what purpose they can be used. Does any body knows about it? Kindly provide me the correct information on the above topic. Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Jackson2]

IDN means - Internationalized Domain Name. These are domain names that include non-ASCII (non-English) characters. "IDN" is the acronym for: "Internationalized Domain Names". IDNs are domain/host names that are represented by native language, non-ASCII characters. The IDN system allows Internet users to use the full alphabet of their language in their domain names. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names represented by local language characters. 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.

[johnson22]

Many efforts are ongoing in the Internet community to make domain names available in character sets other than ASCII. To be able to see and use IDN, you should use a browser that can read (convert Unicode into Punycode). Browsers that support IDNs are IE7, Firefox, Opera and Netscape. The native language domain name is followed by the Top Level Domain (TLD), such as .info, .com, or .org. An example is: müller.info. In whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian or the Latin-based languages with diacritics, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode.

[Trio]

Punycode uses only restricted ASCII characters and numbers (A-z, 0-9) and the hyphen (-). IDNs were developed and promoted by Verisign (.com and .net registry) since late 2000. When you wish to register an IDN domain, you must convert the domain name to Punycode, and actually register the encoded version of the domain name. Typically, when a browser sees a host name, it sends a request to the DNS resolver service which then sends a request to a domain name server to return an IP address corresponding to that host name. When the IP address is returned, a connection is made to the appropriate Web server.

[deveritt]

It is thought that fully multilingual domains may be made compatible (will point to the same IP address) with their English extension versions. Then when the user enters a URL containing an IDN domain into their web browser, it will convert the IDN domain into Punycode and resolve that hostname. To register a .INFO IDN, the IDN must come from an Afilias-authorized and ICANN-accredited registrar. 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. The Domain Name System, which performs a lookup service to translate user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted to the use of ASCII characters, a technical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names.

[Techguru01]

IDN domains may only contain characters from a single script - you cannot mix them. The unique IDN is then placed into the Afilias registry IDN database. An IDNA-enabled application is able to convert between the internationalised and ASCII representations of a domain name. Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names or Web addresses, represented by local language characters. Before this can be accomplished, however, the names to be registered in the IDN database must be converted into the alphanumeric representation based on the Punycode IDN standard.