If you’ve ever typed a URL into your browser, you may have noticed a peculiar pattern. These characters are almost all Latin characters. Why is that? Simply put, the answer is historical inertia. The people who developed the early Internet standards were overwhelmingly English-speaking Americans. They develop rules based on the most familiar tools and languages.
IP-osoiteongelma
In the beginning, the Internet was a digital maze. In order to connect to a remote computer, you need a unique IP address for that computer. This is a long, boring string of numbers like 165.254.202.218. Easy for a machine to process. Terrible for a human to memorize.
The University of Wisconsin solved this problem in 1983 and developed the Domain Name System (DNS). The system maps these confusing numeric IP addresses into human-friendly domains. Suddenly, howstuffworks.com became possible. This is a big step forward in ease of use.
ASCII-standardi
In 1990. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. By 1992, more than a million computers were connected to the Internet, most of them in the United States. The standards are under development.
In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) standard. They want addresses to be easy to read, easy to write and easy to remember. Therefore, the character set was limited.
Allowed character limits are:
– Uppercase English letters (A-Z)
– Lowercase English letters (a-z)
– numerot 0-9
– Some symbols (such as hyphens and periods)
This limit is based on the US-ASCII standard. This character set was developed in the USA and first published in 1963. Works well for English speakers. It also works with many European languages that use similar alphabets.
Global disconnection
This is where the system begins to collapse. By 2009, more than half of the world’s 1.6 billion Internet users spoke a language with a non-Latin character set.
Imagine someone who speaks only Arabic and tries to browse the Internet. The content of your favorite website may be in Arabic. But what about the URL itself? It uses only English characters. For many users, these specific characters may not even exist on the physical keyboard.
It creates a strange disconnect. Even if the content is familiar to you, the identity of the site (the URL) feels foreign and hard to get. Visit sites like el-balad.com. The content is Arabic. The URL is Latin. The difference is immediately noticeable and shocking.
Murtakaa monopoli
English URLs are no longer the only option. In 2009, ICANN approved Internationalized Domain Names (IDN). This means that URLs can contain non-English characters. You can use Chinese, Korean, Arabic or Cyrillic characters directly in the URL.
It was a long time coming. The infrastructure is built in English. The standards were established decades ago. However, as the Internet becomes a truly global utility, these limitations become unsustainable. The address bar now finally corresponds to the user’s language.
