ICANN meeting explores technical feasibility of Indian language domain names
Friday, February 15th, 2008At its 31st Public meeting currently underway in New Delhi, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is exploring the possibility of introducing top level domain names in the local language and local scripts. At present while India has introduced domain names at the secondary level in the local language, the top-level domain names are still in the American ASCII code. In a special session on Internationalized Domain names (IDNs), the ICANN experts currently meeting in New Delhi held detailed discussions on the possibility.
The Indian experts in charge of language development in the Ministry of IT as well as Programme Head of CDAC, Mr Mahesh Kulkarni shared India’s experience in developing a primer on how the 22 Indian languages can be categorized and what scripts and script families are. Development of language tables, policy issues for Indic scripts also figured in the discussions. Senior experts from ICANN debated on the complexities involved in non-English languages. Alternate spellings pose a problem. In conclusion, Indian experts explained that only homographs are being considered and CDAC has achieved Unicode character set finalization for inclusion in IDN.
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