Arabic Web Addresses in Web design

Today, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have become the first nations able to use Arabic characters for entire web addresses. The system was activated yesterday by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) and also enables web addresses to be written from right to left. Despite some websites enabling native scripts to be used minimally, this is the first time that the country codes no longer need to be typed in Latin characters. For example, Egypt will no longer be written as .eg but in Arabic characters. The Egyptian Ministry of Communication is one of the first websites to have a domain name written entirely in Arabic.

Rod Beckstrom, the president of Icann, has described the accomplishment as “historic.” This has opened up the potential for languages, such as Russian, Chinese and Thai to have the same progression made with web addresses. Some countries, such as China have already constructed workarounds to enable users to access websites using their native languages, but these are not internationally recognised and cannot be used on all computers. More than 20 countries have requested to have international domains. Arabic speakers; who may not have used the internet up until now, will have the world of cyber space opened up to them because of this development.

Icann have described this as the most significant change since the creation of the internet 40 years ago as more than 50% of internet users do not use the Latin script. Web address owners in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can now request domain names to be in their country codes.