An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains one or more non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters with diacritics, as required by many languages, or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari or Hebrew. However, the standard for domain names does not allow such characters, and much work has gone into finding a way to internationalize domain names into a standard ASCII format, thereby preserving the stability of the domain name system.
IDN was originally proposed in 1996 by M. Dürst and implemented in 1998 by Tan Juay Kwang and Leong Kok Yong under the guidance of T.W. Tan (James Seng was only recruited later after he joined the nascent company, i-dns.net). After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as a standard, and has been implemented in several top level domains.
In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied. (For the meaning of ‘label’ and ‘ToASCII’, see the section ToASCII and ToUnicode below.) In March 2008, the IETF formed a new IDN working group to update the current IDNA protocol.
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