Helping the web become world wide (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

Although the web has permeated almost 250 nations, everywhere from Ascension Island to Zimbabwe, the language of online life is by no means as diverse.

Take, for instance, domain names such as www.bbc.co.uk. For a long time only Roman characters could be used in domains even if a nation's native language used none of those letters.

Now international domains are getting more widely used to help people get to grips with the web in their own language.

Core control

China has been at the forefront of the efforts to use international domain names. In 2006 it started seriously promoting three Chinese language domain names: gongsi (.com), wangluo (.net) and zhongguo (China).

"China has a long term vision for the project, they are very persistent and they know what they want," said Subramanian Subbiah, co-founder of I-DNS.net, who has worked with China on the native language domains.
***
more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6230426.stm