Non-roman character domain names go live...

Way back in the autumn I mentioned that countries /cultures/languages that operate in non-roman alphabets were soon going to be able to have domain names in their own scripts. Today's the day!

More than half the people in the world don't use a Roman Alphabet / English so it's probably more than about time this happened. Google recently added "pop up virtual keyboards" to its search engine to make life easier for some countries where Roman character keyboards lead to quirky clumsy searching.. Here's an image from the Google Blog.

Website owners across the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt will now be able to apply for website addresses that can be written in Arabic and read right to left. That means that they no longer have to be websitename.eg (for Egypt etc).Check out this BBC Article to see the pictures, as with my Roman alphabet keyboard, I couldn't recreate it even if I could read it!

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has apparently had 21 requests for new internet domain names in 11 languages including Chinese, Russian & Thai amongst others.

Which just reminds me of a picture I took in Bangkok last year which made me smile.Just looks like pretty patterns to me in Thai script :-)

...