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 languages finally (though input methods are missing).

Two other features worth notice are:

• Voice control in 24 languages
• The emoji keyboard is now readily accessible. It had been hidden to non-JP users (and it’s quite entertaining to play with)

But one improvement that I just picked up on — and it could have been added prior to iOS 4 — is the localization of “shortcut” top-level domain feature.

I’ll demonstrate below.

First note my keyboard list (if only I were fluent in all of these languages!):

Now I open the Mail app.

Note  below how when I press and hold the “.com” key that I get a nice range of ccTLDs and other top-level domains to select from.

These domains vary based on my activated keyboards.

The more keyboards you activate, the more domains you have to select from.

This is a very nice touch — and I imagine that the Apple devs are right now working on adding IDNs to the mix…

What other international improvements have you noticed with the new iPhone?

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!

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 (ps): فلسطين
• Qatar (qa): قطر
• Sri Lanka (lk): ලංකා (Sinhalese); இலங்கை (Tamil)
• Taiwan (tw):  台湾 (simplified); 台灣 (traditional)
• Thailand (th): ไทย
• Tunisia (tn):  تونس

For the full list of IDNs now in the ICANN pipeline, I’ve created a page here. It also explains why you may not be able to view all of the scripts on this blog post.

ICANN says it has given preliminary approval for IDNs in 19 countries across 11 languages. Note that this means that these IDNs have passed the string review, which is arguably the most difficult phase. But there is still one stage left before those domains can go live. And don’t get me started on the challenges that some of these domains will pose to existing web browsers — that’s the topic of a future post.

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 a few years back by registering second-level IDNs and hinting that it would offer full-length IDNs if ICANN didn’t get moving. China’s Internet is essentially an intranet after all, so there is no reason the country couldn’t resolve full-length IDNs next week if it wanted.

Perhaps China’s IDN has already been approved ICANN has simply not gotten around to announcing it.

Still, I find the silence curious. Which is why I was interested to read that the president of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, traveled to China recently.

This article posits that China’s IDN application was one of the issues behind his trip.

What do you think? Is China’s IDN being used as leverage by ICANN?

Here’s the video. It’s a great introduction to how ICANN has evolved and where it’s headed. And, yes, Rod does talk about my favorite topic: IDNs!

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

Yesterday, Bangladesh announced that it too had applied. Here is the domain the government selected:

• বাংলা

There are 300 million Bangla speakers around the world who will potentially benefit from this domain.

To be clear, this domain has not yet received string approval from ICANN (the first four domains have been approved).

Here is the article that shows the prime minister of Bangladesh filing the application online. Yes, online, and no doubt after typing in an ASCII URL.

A year from now there will be full-length Bangla URLs.

This is getting interesting!

PS: If you’re seeing empty boxes above instead of Bangla characters, you don’t have the necessary font installed. This is one of the glaring differences between Windows and Mac. Below is a screen grab that shows Firefox on Mac on the left and IE8 on Windows 7 on the right.

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.

According to ICANN, 10 applications (representing five languages) were submitted over the first four days.

ICANN won’t announce exactly who applied and for what until each application is successful — which pushes us well into 2010.

So I’ve had to turn to press reports from the registries to piece together the data.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

• Egypt (Was the first country to apply)
• Saudi Arabia
• UAE
• Russia
• China
• Bulgaria
• Israel

Unless a country made more than one application (which I don’t believe is allowed under fast track protocol) I’m still missing three countries. I’m guessing there could be one or more additional Middle East countries. And perhaps Taiwan.

What do you think? What countries/languages am I missing?

Here’s the process:

The Fast Track process is only for ccTLDs and only for those countries with non-Latin official languages.

So if you qualify, get your application ready — that and your $26,000 fee.

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.

So I half-expected a “boy that cried wolf” scenario to play out when ICANN finally did approve IDNs.

That is, ICANN would say “IDNs are coming!” and the media would collectively yawn.

But that’s not what happened.

IDNs have received a media blitz over the past week. Separate articles have appeared in:

WIRED

New York Times

Associated Press

Wall Street Journal

IP Watch

This is a welcome sign for anyone who has to educate co-workers and, more important, upper management to the importance of supporting a truly multilingual Internet.

Granted, it remains to be seen if the intended users of IDNs actually want to use them.

I’m betting they do.

We’ll know much more a year from now.

It’s beginning to feel like Groundhog Day when I read these “IDNs are coming” articles.

Here’s one I read this morning about ICANN’s meeting in Seoul, happening now, where the powers that be are expected to approve “fast track” IDNs.

The article notes:

“This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago,” Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the ICANN board, told reporters, calling it a “fantastically complicated technical feature.” He said he expects the board to grant approval on Friday, the conference’s final day.

Okay, so Friday is the day.

Now when will IDNs enter the real world (aside from China, where they have been in the real world for years now):

Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s new president and CEO, said that if the change is approved, ICANN would begin accepting applications for non-English domain names and that the first entries into the system would likely come sometime in mid 2010.

Wait a second. Weren’t IDNs supposed to be launched this year? Or 2007?

I shouldn’t make a big deal about this. IDNs are not trivial. The smart folks in the IETF have been working extra hard to finalize the new tech standard. The security risks are real and tests needed to be conducted over the past year before moving ahead. The logistics of managing the rollout among the world’s registries is significant. And let’s not get started on how IDNs will impact applications and the companies who support them.

IDNs are happening though. As they should.

Of the 1.6 billion Internet users worldwide, Beckstrom — a former chief of U.S. cybersecurity — said that more than half use languages that have scripts based on alphabets other than Latin.

“So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world’s Internet users today, but more than half of probably the future users as the use of the Internet continues to spread,” he said.

By the way, ICANN has a new Web design. I like it.

PS:  Here’s a great op-ed on IDNs and how far they have yet to go…

Internationalized domain names at last becoming a reality around the world — and not just in China?

It’s looking that way.

For starters, the IETF is in “last call” of IDNAbis — which is a revision to the 2003 IDNA standard. This revision irons out a number of nagging issues (though not all of them) but more importantly lays the groundwork for ICANN, which has “fast tracked” IDNs for this fall.

And then there are the folks who will provide IDN registrations — the registrars and registries. It looks like .EU is going to support IDNs (though details are vague) an Bulgaria is planning Cyrillic IDNs.

What do you think? Are IDNs going mass market — finally?