Internationalized domain name

Common card · No. 208643

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in non-Latin script or alphabet or in the Latin alphabet-based characters with diacritics or ligatures. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multibyte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System (DNS) as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription. The DNS, which performs a lookup service to translate mostly user-friendly names into network addresses for locating Internet resources, is restricted in practice to the use of ASCII characters, a practical limitation that initially set the standard for acceptable domain names. The internationalization of domain names is a technical solution to translate names written in language-native scripts into an ASCII text representation that is compatible with the DNS. Internationalized domain names can only be used with applications that are specifically...

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