Interweb goes multi-lingual

OUR INTERWEB RULERS have woken up to the fact that most of the planet doesn't speak English and have prepared a bunch of IP domans in languages other than the Queen's vernacular.

There are currently eleven domain suffixes under test. They are: Arabic, Persian, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Tamil and, for some reason, Yiddish.

According to an ICANN spokesperson, these were chosen for having produced most complaints from miffed surfers. AP reports that if the tests go well, the 11 could be in use by the end of 2008.

ICANN and Internet Engineering Task Force have used a system known as Punycode to convert the non-English domains.

Currently only Opera of the major web browsers in use supports Punycode, apparently. µ