An International Domain Name (IDN) is an Internet Domain Name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language – Specific Script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Hindi or the Latin alphabet – based characters with diacritics, such as French. International Domain Name (IDN) is domain name or web address, represented by local language characters or non – English Languages for example Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Danish and German. In 2003, as the internet expanded internationally, internationalized domain names were developed to serve the increasing number of non-English speaking users. Standard domain names, which are limited to latin letters, the numbers 0 to 9, and hyphens, are unable to accurately represent the majority of languages, which can be frustrating for global web users. Additionally, it only seems fair to allow internet users to publish material in their native languages. IDNs are domain names with symbols, numbers, or hyphens that are not in the Latin alphabet. Special characters are typically accented letters and letters from various alphabets, such as Greek, Cyrillic, Latin expanded, etc., when used in domain names.
These symbols can be utilized in:
- The actual domain suffix (for instance,., which is the Greek name for the.eu)
- The web address (www.gwswebhost.com)
Process of An IDN (International Domain Name) :-
A Registrant requests an IDN from a registrar that supports IDNs. The registrar converts the Local – Language characters into a sequence of supported letters using an ASCII – Compatible encoding (ACE). The IDN (International Domain Name) is added to the TLD Zone files and propagated across the internet.