Recently, there has been a lot of progress in implementing Web addresses with non-English characters including different scripts. This ability is courtesy of the IDN (Internationalized Domain Name) technology.
Some test links are given below, but they may not work in older browsers. Note also that many have ASCII only equivalents or redirect to a site with an older ASCII only URL.
- http://þorn.info – a blog dedicated to the Runic letter thorn (/þ/ or /θ/ in IPA or “hard th” in English), also at http://evertype.com/blog/thorn/.
- http://bücher.ch – Online German language bookstore which actually redirects to http://www.weltbild.de/ Note that http://bücher.de directs to another online bookstore, http://www.buecher.de/
- http://中央大学.tw/ – National Central University, Taiwan (also at http://www.ncu.edu.tw/)
- http://山东大学.cn/ – Shandong University, China (also at http://www.sdu.edu.cn/)
Wikipedia is also a good source of non-ASCII URL’s. Translated articles on Elizabeth I of England can be found at these locations.
- http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Елизавета_I (Russian)
- http://ang.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeþ_I_Engla_Cwēn (Ænglisc/Old English)
- http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/エリザベス1世_(イングランド女王) (Japanese)
- http://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/إليزابيث_الأولى_ملكة_إنجلترا (Arabic)
For the latest news on IDN implementation, see IDN page on the ICANN Web site at http://www.icann.org/en/topics/idn/
