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GO GLOBAL WITH i-DNS
If your organization
uses its Web site to conduct business on the Web, it may have started out
selling to a restricted area, such as the United States. But what if you
decide to expand your e-commerce horizons? Taking your Web site
international can mean many challenges, such as language barriers,
currency exchange rates, and more. First and foremost, you want to make
sure all those customers you're targeting in other countries can access
your site, particularly those cultures that rely on non-Western languages,
such as Chinese and Japanese.
As you probably
know, your Web site's domain name, which relies on the domain name system
(DNS), correlates to your specific IP numeric address. The foundation of
DNS lies with the English language and uses traditional European
characters for letters and numerals. What about all the other alphabets
out there? They won't work under DNS, which uses the ASCII characters
found on a traditional keyboard.
But don't give up
your hopes of going global yet. There's a relatively new alternative
solution that's growing in popularity. Developed four years ago, the
Internationalized Domain Name System (i-DNS) changes native language
encoding to ASCII characters using a conversion process. Recognized by
ICANN and other established DNS institutions, the company behind this
technology is i-DNS.net International.
The core of
i-DNS.net's system relies on four root servers in San Jose, CA,
Washington, DC, Singapore, and Tokyo. Localized servers in countries with
unique alphabets (such as Israel, China, Bangladesh, India, Greece, etc.)
back up these root servers. For the most part, the local servers take care
of the conversion process, translating registered domain names in Chinese,
for example, and tying them to preassigned ASCII strings that translate
into unique working domain names in the established DNS
system.
There are a couple
of ways in which this translation occurs.
The browsing
computer goes to a preassigned i-DNS.net server in the specific country,
which then converts the Web page request from the foreign alphabet to
Unicode and further translates that to ASCII. The server then resolves the
request and sends the proper IP number back to the browsing computer,
enabling it to access the correct Web page.
End users can also
download a Windows plug-in called iClient, which performs the same
Unicode/ASCII translation on the user's machine before going out to the
Internet. After the software completes the ASCII translation, it sends it
to an i-DNS server for IP resolution, which sends the IP number back to
the user's machine. Users can also download iResolve, a browser plug-in
designed especially for Internet Explorer users.
For more information
about i-DNS.net's offerings, check out its Web site. Companies can
register domain names in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Tamil,
Hindi, Telugu, and Cyrillic. For a list of registrars, visit DNS.net's
Domain Name Registration Web page.
http://www.i-dns.net/
http://www.i-dns.net/namereg/namereg.html
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