INTERNATIONALIZED DOMAIN NAMES
The DNS, like the rest of the Internet, was never designed to support all the languages of the world. The current DNS allows only for a subset of the ASCII character set, specifically:
A through Z (and a through z)
0 through 9
hyphen
Consider the dilemma of the French car manufacturer, Citroën. If someone tries to visit Citroën’s web site by typing www.citroën.com, he or she will be disappointed; the DNS doesn’t recognize characters such as ë or ã, for example. As a result, web users must type www.citroen.com. Although this might seem like a trivial detail to many English speakers, it is anything but trivial to French speakers.
Citroën is relatively fortunate, for most of the characters in its name are included ...
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