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You will soon be able to access the Internet in Hindi or Marathi, right from the first keystroke. Thanks to a technical and administrative breakthrough, you will be able to not only type out the address of a website in the scripts of any of the country's 22 official languages, but also access sites under the domain name .भारत.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced that it would declare an end to the exclusive use of Latin characters (the script in which English and most other European languages are written) for website addresses. "This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago," Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the Icann board in charge of reviewing the change, told reporters.
ICANN president Rod Beckstrom said the change would come into effect in the middle of 2010. Icann aims to start receiving applications next month.
In India, the Centre for Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which has its headquarters in Pune, is ready with the technology to effect the change for Indians. "So far, we had control only over websites with the suffix .in. This suffix will soon be replaced with .bharat in the scheduled Indian languages," said Mahesh Kulkarni, group coordinator, C-DAC GIST (graphics and intelligence-based script technology).
Once domain names in Indian scripts come into existence, www.google.in could be written as www.google.भारत and www.cdac.in as www.cdac.भारत. Indian scripts would also be enabled for suffixes such as .org and .co.
"This is an important step in the area of language computing," said Kulkarni about the project which has been jointly undertaken by C-DAC and the department of information technology (DeitY).
Thrush, the Icann board chairman, said when the change comes into force, it will be possible to use characters from languages such as Chinese, Arabic, Korean and Japanese as well for a full internet address.
"Of the 1.6 billion internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not Latin-based," Beckstrom, Icann president, said. "So this change is very much necessary for not only half the world's internet users today but more than half, probably, of the future users as the internet continues to spread."
He said internet addresses would no longer use limited 'generic top-level domains' such as .com or .org, and instead use more flexible 'internationalised domain names' such as .post or .bank.
Beckstrom said the change would also allow internet users to type fewer keystrokes to access a website which will "give companies a quicker way to get directly to their customers".
He said the world would be able to "save roughly 60 to 100 billion human keystrokes a day" by getting rid of keystrokes that are currently needed to find web addresses ending, for example, in individual country codes.
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