Time to brush-up on your…
Not everyone on the planet speaks English – despite what many Americans believe. As a matter of fact, not everyone on the planet uses a Latin-based alphabet to communicate.
That’s why, a few months ago ICANN — the organization which controls Internet names and addresses worldwide – announced that that would soon begin handing-out non-Latin-based URLs.
Soon begins now.
As of today, you can head to http://موقع.وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر and be among the first to visit this Website with an Arabic address.
For those not adept at typing Web addresses from right-to-left, this basically translates into http://xn--4gbrim.xn—-ymcbaaajlc6dj7bxne2c.xn--wgbh1c/ar/default.aspx which is just a tiny bit easier to understand.
The Website belongs to the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. It can also be accessed in its English form at http://www.mcit.gov.eg/.
The Arabic-based URL opened with no problems for me in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome in Windows XP, Vista and 7 as well as Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS.
Remember, this is the first non-Latin based URL. Expect many, many more. Just think how many hundreds of thousands of additional Websites will be asking for native language addresses in China, India, Russia, Indonesia, Israel and lots more.
No longer will surfers around the world have to know a Latin character-based language (usually English) to get to a Website in their native tongue.
And, from now on, it’s the rest of us who may have to become adept at using URLs in someone else’s language.