The World Wide Web is exactly that - a very large network of interlinked hypertext documents accessible to anyone on the planet at any time of day...so long as they have a computer and an internet connection, of course.

But whilst websites have always existed in a myriad of languages and scripts, the all-important URL has always been restricted predominantly to Latin characters - albeit with some exceptions - and the country code suffix (e.g. ‘.fr’ for France or ‘.de’ for Germany) always had to use Latin characters, such as A-Z. But 'net regulator Icann has now enabled the creation of full web addresses that contain no Latin characters whatsoever.

Crucially, the new non-Latin URLs will facilitate domain names in scripts that read right-to-left (RTL). Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt are among the first countries to have URLs in Arabic scripts, with Chinese, Thai and Tamil scripts likely to follow for Asian countries shortly.

In what has been described as the biggest change to the ‘net since its inception four decades ago, the 50%+ of internet users whose native language uses a non-Latin script will certainly be happy. And this move is one that truly puts the word ‘World’ into WWW.

tags: Non-Latin URLS