Background

From www.ලංකා.lk

IDN History

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label that is displayed in software applications, in whole or in part, in a language-specific script or alphabet, such as Chinese, Russian or the Latin-based languages with diacritics, such as French. These writing systems are encoded by computers in multi-byte Unicode. Internationalized domain names are stored in the Domain Name System as ASCII strings using Punycode transcription.

For more details visit IDN History

IDN in Sri Lanka

The ICTA Core Group on Local Languages, at its meeting held on 24th October 2007 agreed to set up a Task Force to work on IDNs. This decision was ratified by the Core Group’s successor, the ICTA Local Languages Working Group (LLWG), at its meeting held on 5th March 2008. Consequently, the Task Force on IDNs was established and commenced work in May 2008

The Task Force on IDNs comprised; representatives from ICTA, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRCSL), the LK Domain Registry (LKNIC), the Department of Official Languages, the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC), the Associated Newspapers of Ceylon (ANCL) and two ISPs- Sri Lanka Telecom and Eureka.

It was imperative that the subject of IDNs is addressed as soon as possible. This subject was being addressed in the international arena and it was necessary for Sri Lanka to define the country code Top Level Domains (ccTLDs) and the generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) in Sinhala and in Tamil, and implement these.