I'm not sure if everyone has heard the big news yet, but ICANN has officially allowed the use of non-Latin characters in web addresses. You can expect web address now in different languages, including Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese and more.

 

The applications for IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) begins on November 6th. Currently the restrictions are only people in countries can apply for domain names in that language, so it seems that a web designer here in the UK couldn't register a domain name in Korean, for example.

 

Personally, I think this will have a very small affect on me. I've never been asked about this, and all my clients speak English as a first language, so I can't see myself being asked to work with a domain name in a different language.

 

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I noticed the other day, you can use Unicode(?) symbols for urls and it translates it into a wierd address (latin characters). So does that mean, say for example

 

http://www.☹.co.uk won't display as http://www.xn--64h.co.uk/ in the url bar anymore, but as the actual sad face? lol :B