Internationalizing the Internet

By its very nature, the Internet is a global medium that touches billions of individuals whose vocabulary does not derive from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, and whose alphabet is not that of the ancient Romans. The Internet Engineering Task Force´s recent approval of a standard for domain name internationalization. This means, in effect, that it will soon be possible to create domain names in non-ASCII characters, such as Chinese or Cyrillic script. The ability to create internationalized domain names speaks directly to the issue of localization - the ability to present a Web site using the target audience´s language, style, graphics, and such cultural conventions as currencies, dates, and units of measure. Unicode, by far the most powerful tool for globalizing Internet data, provides a unique number for every character, regardless of platform, program or language.