Asian characters take naming to a new domain

NEWS Domain name registrars are now accepting names with Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters which means web addresses, currently limited to the ASCII set of 37 characters, now have over 40,000 characters available. It is this vast expansion that worries the engineers of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as they struggle towards the design of 'Unicode' - a standard to cover all character sets. Christian de Larrinaga, chairman of the Internet Society of England, said: "US companies think they can play around with the technology of the web. This is not acceptable. There is a respected process for making these changes and the IETF is working on the domain name question." Dave Barratt, head of US operations for web services company Net Benefit, said: "I can understand their concern, I'm an engineer myself, but this is just a test and there has been a good chunk of the world that hasn't had proper access to the web that should do so. "I think it's progress. It's difficult to co-ordinate this sort of development without trying it out. The internet hasn't been without its problems in the past - this is how we learn." Sites in Asian scripts will not be able to use the new names for at least a month and will still have to use the traditional suffixes such as dot-com, dot-net or dot-org.