Web Alphabet Set to Change

The World Wide Web is about to start using the languages of the world.

Leaders of the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet are expected to decide at a meeting here Friday to let Web addresses be expressed in characters other than those of the Roman alphabet. Already, portions of a Web address can be written in other languages. But the suffix, such as the “com” after the dot, must be typed in Roman letters.

The change will allow the suffix–known as a top-level domain in the architecture of the Internet–to be expressed in 17 other alphabets. They include traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Russian Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Hebrew. Dozens of other alphabets are likely to be added in coming years.

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