The latest creation from Byte Level Research, available for purchase at bytelevel.com/eyechart.

This unique take on the Snelling eye chart includes characters from more than 20 languages.

It’s the perfect gift for an eye doctor — as well as the globally myopic.

This is a significant development — particularly since China was one of the major forces pushing ICANN to support IDNs.

To give you an idea of how these new IDNs are poised to change the Internet as we know it, I’ve overlayed the approved IDNs onto my Country Codes of the World map.

You’ll notice both simplified and traditional script IDNs for both China and Taiwan.

Here’s my running list of all IDNs that have passed string evaluation stage.

Here it is: http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر

Give it a test drive.

I just did (on the Mac) and Firefox, Safari, and Chrome all worked fine. Here is Safari:

Safari is unique in that it left the URL as is instead of converting it into its “punycode” equivalent shown below:

Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all manage and display IDNs a little bit differently. I have my two cents on how they “should” handle IDNs and I’ll be writing about that shortly.

In the meantime, I’m just thrilled to see a real live full-length IDN.

This is the beginning of the end of the last two roadblocks to a truly multilingual Internet.

A few updates:

Here’s the BBC take.

And as “F Wolff” noted in his comment, this URL above is not the first full-length IDN ever; ICANN has been testing full-length IDNs for some time here. But my point here is that IDNs are now publicly available — in Egypt at least — with many more to come.

And, to clarify, partial IDNs have also been around for years. It was the supporting of IDNs at the top level that has finally enabled the creation of fully non-Latin domains.

So here is Egypt’s IDN:

If you look at the first browser screen grab above, you’ll notice that this string is on the far  left, not on the right, as it is a bidirectional script. But when a bidirectional script gets displayed as punycode, in the second sreen grab, the entire text string is flipped back to left-to-right order.

I find it interesting that the first batch of IDNs to go live also happen to be among the most challenging to support — not just in browser windows but across so many other software applications. But for those working in software globalization, these are exciting challenges!

Here they are:

• Saudi Arabia (SA): السعودية
• Egypt (EG): مصر
• United Arab Emirates (AE): امارات
• Russian Federation (RU): рф

I’m surprised to see China absent from this list. But there are 12 other requests behind these four.

I know it’s way too early to start predicting the rise of the Arabic-language Internet, but it’s exciting to see such interest in the Middle East.

Here’s the ICANN press release.

So now that the media hype over internationalized domain names (IDNs) has died down, let’s focus on the messy details of what this all means.

First of all, we’re not about to see the non-Latin equivalent of .com anytime soon. Certainly not next year. There are several reason for this which I will cover in a later post.

What we should see next year are the non-Latin equivalents of country code top-level domains, such as .ru, .cn, .sa. It just so happens that I’ve got a handy map of all ccTLDs here.

Not all ccTLDs will be eligible for a “fast track” ccTLD, just those from countries that have official non-Latin languages.

The two largest countries I would expect to launch IDNs in 2010 are China and Russia.

China has had its IDN ready to go for some time now; the traditional Chinese character version is shown above. The simplified character version is below. The assumption is that both versions will be bundled together.

Below is a screen grab from China’s government web site. Perhaps in 2010 we’ll see “GOV.cn” replaced.

Russia will likely be using this IDN next year:

This IDN is short for “Russian Federation.” Why not just use the equivalent of .RU, you ask? Well, that would give us .ру, which looks entirely too similar to .py (Paraguay).

So there you have it — IDNs for China and Russia, with many more to follow.

If you look closely at the lower right corner of the screen, the Arabic link is not correctly displayed. I certainly wasn’t looking that closely, but Ben was.

As he noted, the characters are correct, but they’re not joined properly.

Below is what the word should look like and, below it, the characters displayed individually:

Arabic  characters exhibit different forms based on their position within a word. There are four forms, described here.

In the case of United’s in-flight entertainment screen, this is is a big mistake. How did it occur?

Clearly, a proofreader could have helped United avoid this situation altogether.

Technically speaking, it could be that the entertainment system does not support Unicode, which is the best way to go about supporting not only Arabic, but most of the world’s languages. However, the Asian fonts appear to be correctly displayed, which leads me to believe that this is not a technical issue but simply a matter of the Arabic word losing its joining properties at some point during the production process — and nobody ever noticing, until now.

Thanks Ben for the heads up!

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
- Tagalog

Since languages span borders, the total number of country domains now supported by iGoogle number more than 70.

According to the Google Blog, “with this launch, more than 99% of Internet users can take advantage of these features in their native language.”

Based on my research, your Web site needs to support 10 languages to reach more than 80% of the world’s Internet users. To get to 99%, you definitely have to exceed 30 to 35 languages (depending on the mix), which very few companies have done. In the 2007 Web Globalization Report Card, out of the 200 Web sites reviewed, only 28 sites exceeded 30 languages and only 3 sites exceeded 40 languages.

The languages that Google has recently added reflects a larger Web globalization trend. Large multinationals that already support the core Western European and Asian languages are now turning their attention to Eastern and Northern Europe and the Middle East.

While a Slovakian Web site may be off the radar for most global marketing executives, it may not be off their radar for very long.

One of the things I first noticed (and love) about the Web browser is the .com button on the keypad, shown here.

Of course, this little shortcut isn’t so handy if I want to visit a .org or .edu Web site.

It’s also not much use for visiting country-specific Web sites, such as www.yahoo.fr.

Which is why the localization of this interface is going to be an interesting thing to watch evolve.

It is just a matter of time before we see the iPhone launched around the world. So does that mean the .com key will be replaced by .de or .fr keys? I imagine so.

This will give companies yet another good reason to register country code domains. While a Web user in France may first go to acme.com and then navigate to acme.fr when visiting a Web site. Using the iPhone, it’s likely that person will simply go to acme.fr, an example of a new interface changing user behavior.

The other interesting thing I’ve noticed on the iPhone so far is that it doesn’t appear to be using a “conventional” Unicode font. That is, I’m finding that the interface displays Chinese and other Asian scripts just fine — as well as Cyrillic — but it can’t display Arabic or Hebrew scripts. What this says to me is that Apple doesn’t have the Middle East on its near-term global expansion plans. My guess is that it’s using the scaled-down font to conserve drive space. Documentation is hard to come by so far so I’d love to hear from anyone out there who knows more about this.

I’ve been to Europe once so far and the iPhone held up quite nicely; AT&T didn’t hit me up for too much in roaming fees. It is interesting — though not surprising — that you can’t de-activate cellular roaming and just rely on Wi-Fi. I did have a faulty power adapter but got that replaced at the Apple store with no resistance.

But back to the Web browser. I know this has been said many times before, but this is the first phone that makes browsing the Web about as easy as it is on a computer. And I suspect that over time this will have an impact not only on how companies develop Web sites in the US, but how they localize these sites for markets around the world.

You can see which companies are included in this year’s report here. This has been a particularly exciting report to write because there are some very clear trends developing. There are also a few new entrants to the Top 10 list. Here’s who made the Top 10 list last year.

If you want advance notice of when the report publishes, please be sure to sign up for our free email newsletter: Web Globalization News.

Still, most multionationals shy away from the Middle East because they see only hurdles — from instability to language and culture to low spending power. But there are opportunities in this region for those companies willing to take a chance and learn from the ground up.

Speaking of opportunities, Harvard Business School features an interview with professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter on her recent research on multinationals in Egypt. She says her “project looks at how the “giants” are transforming themselves in light of their continuing and increasing global scope, and what kind of impact they have on the ground, including whether and how they influence the standards of the countries in which they operate as they seek global consistency.”

PS: The February issue of Global by Design features an article on Arabizing Your Web Site.

For Elle, the challenge is complex because there is no one “Middle East” market when it comes to fashion and cultural dress codes. Says the article, “Clothing customs vary widely throughout the region. In some countries like Lebanon, many of the clothes shown in Elle might be worn on the street. In others, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, they’d be reserved for private gatherings of women. Accessories, from designer shoes to handbags, scarves, sunglasses and jewelry, are permitted almost everywhere.”

McDonald’s got started in China in 1990 and plans to have 1,000 locations open by the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Roughly half of all future locations will have drive-thrus. But because this is still a new concept in China, McDonald’s is treading carefully. For its first drive-thru, it had a human taking orders rather than that garbled box we Americans have barked into for years. The larger issue is that the Chinese look at restaurants as gathering places and not pass-thru places, at least not yet. Says the article…

McDonald’s has spent much of its time in China learning to slow down from its fast-paced U.S. roots. The company’s new restaurants have Internet connections, play areas for children and special seating for their mothers, all of which are designed to reinforce their role as gathering places. “We eat McDonald’s when the kids want to,” says Luo Wenwei, a housewife from the prosperous southern town of Dongguan, who drives a Volkswagen.

It’s getting a little crowded at the bottom of each News page…

On Friday, Borders announced a deal that would take it into the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. This is a joint venture with the Al Maya Group.

According to the press release, “The first of what is expected to be multiple Borders stores in the United Arab Emirates will be located in Dubai at Deira City Centre, the premier shopping center in the GCC. The Borders stores will offer a vast array of book titles in English and Arabic. Borders will provide training and marketing support to Al Maya. The store will be operated by Al Maya consistent with the Borders brand experience.”

Currently, Borders uses Amazon to sell books online. I have to wonder what the marketing folks at Borders are thinking as they expand into a market that Amazon does not support linguistically. That’s not to say Amazon can’t support Arabic, but the company hasn’t added a language since 2004, when it launched support for French in Canada and purchased Chinese bookseller Joyo.

Borders had a down year sales-wise domestically; internationally is where the growth is right now. Last year Borders CEO Greg Josefowicz said he was looking betting big on intl. growth and this is one step in that direction. India is the other big step Borders plans to take; Amazon is creeping in that direction as well.

So what’s the solution?

A few years back we saw RealNames launch a workaround to the DNS in which companies could register their company name and all the Web user needed to do was input the company name. RealNames imploded in 2002 but I believe the technology is still being supported by somebody; I just typed a few brand names into my Safari browser (BMW, Coke, Apple) and was taken immediately to their corporate sites.

Today, I came across a press release from a company that is trying to do basically what RealNames did, only it appears to be a lot less usable. UnifiedRoot is developing a parallel DNS that would allow you to register a domain that completely bypasses the DNS we know and love, as illustrated below:

I don’t see the value of this system. Large companies are going to register every country domain they need for IP reasons alone, so it can’t be a cost issue. I could be missing something here, but so far it doesn’t seem much easier than relying on Google.

What I think UnifiedRoot missed is the huge untapped potential for serving domains in non-Latin scripts, like Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese. The current solutions in this area are little more than hacks, and although the folks at ICANN are working on a long-term solution, they’ve been working on it for half a decade and still have a ways to go. It has to do with the immense complexity of migrating the DNS to Unicode and the numerous potential security issues that would result.

So while I’m glad to see UnifiedRoot taking a shot at building a better DNS, they’re not there yet.

According to the press release, more than “100 web pages should be available in Arabic for the new site by next month. These will highlight the World Bank’s partnerships in the region, learning initiatives, publications and research reports in Arabic, as well as project stories from Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, West Bank and Gaza, and Yemen.”

The World Bank has more than $4 billion invested in the region so it’s nice to see the organization spending a few thousand dollars on a Web site for the region. While I applaud their efforts, this site should have been live years ago. Based on a study I conducted recently of all the world’s major languages, Arabic clearly is most overlooked by major international companies and organizations. That’s a shame. Arabic has more than 200 million speakers around the world, who increasingly have access to the Internet. I hope the World Bank is a sign of things to come…

Google handles more than 200 million queries a day from around the world. Increasingly, these queries are not in English. Over the past few years, Google has aggressively localized its search engine for more than 60 languages. These language-specific search engines are very important to Google’s continued growth, since the majority of new Internet users are not native-English speakers.

Keep a close eye on that tiny purple streak representing Chinese; it’s sure to expand. While there are only about 100 million German speakers in the world, there are well over a billion Chinese speakers. Also expect to see Arabic (200 million speakers) make an entrance in a few years.

Google began in 1998 as an English-language search engine. My, how times — and the Internet — have changed. And, if you’re interested, Google is looking for an International Webmaster.

A must-read article in the NY Times explains the sudden success of Mecca Cola. Here’s a reaction from Coke:

Coke acknowledges that the Arab boycott has hurt. Singling out North and West Africa, most notably Morocco and Egypt, the president of Coca-Cola Africa, Alexander B. Cummings Jr., told analysts in October that “our business in these countries has been hurt by the boycotting of American brands.”

Another Coke executive, asked about Mecca-Cola, said simply, “We are aware of Mecca, and we have felt the impact of the boycott of American goods.”

Also, take a moment to visit the Mecca site. Thanks to the power of globalization, Coca-Cola will soon be battling with Mecca Cola in stores around the U.S. Globalization is a door that swings both ways.