Web going global finally Reports are out that English may have to share with other languages in Web addresses, giving way for urls to appear in simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew, among others.	Nic Mokhoff Research Editor
That's good news for a WORLD WIDE WEB. It's always been pretty much an English language game in the hi-tech arena. Chinese and Japanese engineering students needed to study English in order to engage with their American counterparts. Not sure American engineering students had to do the same. While this latest report in the Wall Street Journal on urls in various languages is a welcome step in internationalizing the Web, it is but a small step to bring more plurality to the global medium. "The statistics show that over half of the users of the Internet today don't use the Roman alphabet in their first language," says Rod Beckstrom, chief executive of Icann. "It's an issue of national pride in some cases and cultural identity." The WSJ report said the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers..."are expected to decide to let Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet." The change is to be made to the suffix. This suffix will be expressed in 17 other alphabets. Entities such as Runet might be pleased. Posted by Nic Mokhoff on Oct 27, 2009 09:54 AM in Consumer

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