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The World Wide Web will soon allow non-Latin languages to be used in URLs, an international internet body has confirmed.
Websites such as visitkorea.or.kr can soon drop the English characters in favour of its native text, while the official Iraqi Parliament website will no longer need to be www.parliament.iq, and instead be written in Arabic, or Russian, or Hindi, or any language at all.
Allowing websites to not just be based on Latin text, the theory goes, will make the web more accessible for many people around the world.
Plans for a more global internet structure were announced late in October, having been established since July 2008.
Shortly after the landmark initiative was announced, the communications minister for Egypt said the nation see the world’s first Arabic language domain.
"The IDN [International Domain Names] program will encompass close to one hundred thousand characters, opening up the internet to billions of potential users around the globe," said Peter Dengate Thrush, chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), as quoted by the BBC.
