The Beyond-ASCII Internet

For much of its history the Internet has been based on the Latin alphabet and its ASCII digital representation. Tina Dam of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will explain an ongoing effort aimed expanding this universe a creating new Internet realms, or top level domains, that use non-Latin/ASCII writing systems and open significant possibilities for communities worldwide to express themselves in their own languageOn 14 August 2007, the ICANN Board of Directors approved representing the word 'test' translated into: Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The technical evaluations of these "internationalized domain name top level domains" (ISD TLD) and their usability in various applications will proceed following their delegation. If the evaluation is successful, the introduction will pave the way for the launch of new TLDs in 2008. Dam's presentation will explore the effort, and show how commonly used browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera) function in these environments. IDN director Tina Dam was appointed Director for ICANN's IDN Program in 2006. In this capacity she develops and manages all IDN related projects at ICANN focused at the deployment of internationalized top level domains.

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: eric mankin