TechRaga

Arpit,

Domain names in Indian Languages have been available for a long time now, in fact, for more than a decade. Early last year (around Feb 2009), I had booked a .com Domain Name in Bengali (though I ultimately didn’t use it and didn’t even renew).

And I could even type the Bengali Domain Name into the address bar of Internet Explorer.

Domain names in non-ASCII characters are called IDNs, i.e. Internationalised Domain Names. What actually happens is that during registration, behind the scenes, the non-ASCII parts are treated as labels, and are normalized using an algorithm called “NamePrep”. They are then converted back to ASCII again using a code called “Punycode”, and then prefixed by the four character “xn--” and saved on the DNS. Later, when a browser or web app requests for an IDN, the same process happens on the requested domain name (IDN), and then this ‘xn--’ prepended ASCII name is compared with the one saved on the DNS to get the IP.

What will happen now is that even the Country Code TLDs (ccTLDs) will be allowed in non-ASCII characters. For example, you can now even write the “.com” in non-ASCII script (or non-Latin script), which you could not have earlier. However, that may take some time, as till now, only four TLDs have been accepted for non-ASCII, and Hindi (or any Indian script) is not among them.

You can get more information about this at :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name

Those were my two cents. Hope they were helpful.

Wish you a great day,

Summit.