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What is Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)?

April 26, 2017applications domain names idna internationalizing

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What is Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA)?

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Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could not be handled by the existing DNS and name resolver infrastructure. Rather than redesigning the existing DNS infrastructure, it was decided that non-ASCII domain names should be converted to a suitable ASCII-based form by web browsers and other user applications; IDNA specifies how this conversion is to be done. IDNA was designed for maximum backward compatibility with the existing DNS system, which was designed for use with names using only a subset of the ASCII character set. An IDNA-enabled application is able to convert between the restricted-ASCII and non-ASCII representations of a domain, using the ASCII form in cases where it is needed (such as for DNS lookup), but being able to present the more readable non-ASCII form to users. Applications that do not support IDNA will not be able to handle d