Finally, the World Wide Web will live up to its name. The decision by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that Web sites written in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and other non-ASCII character sets will be able to have their Internet domain names displayed in their own languages truly makes the Web a global worldwide network. For the past 40 years (the Internet turned 40 this week) the Internet and the Web have been the exclusive domain of English language addresses. For non-English speaking countries it has been the real world equivalent to forcing them to use English language stationary. Continue reading →