Global by Design

The iPhone is a global success story. And one of the reasons for this success can be attributed to the device’s support for more than 30 languages. But with the iPhone 4 update, Apple continues to push ahead on the global front. Multilingual Mac has documented these improvements, which include fonts that now display some Indic [...]

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ICANN gave approval to Chinese IDNs — for China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. 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 [...]

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ICANN announced today that its first full-length IDN has gone live. 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” [...]

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A few weeks back I asked Where is China’s IDN? ICANN not only answered my question about China, but also about a host of additional countries (and territory) that had applied for fast-track IDNs. Here are the most recent IDN (string evaluation) approvals: China (cn): 中國 (traditional); 中国 (simplified) Hong Kong (hk): 香港 Palestinian Territory [...]

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In January of this year, ICANN announced that four fast-track IDNs had made it through linguistic approval — effectively clearing the way for commercialization. Oddly missing from that list was China’s IDN. One of the reasons ICANN initiated a fast-track process — if not the reason — was China. China began putting pressure on ICANN [...]

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