Introduction to Internationalized Domain Names for Applications (IDNA)

The domain name system (DNS) enables devices to lookup or resolve text hostname queries to identify respective IP addresses, among other things. The DNS protocol defines that DNS messages are encoded as ASCII characters and DNS information is generally stored in ASCII character format. Unfortunately, while ASCII characters have been defined to effectively represent the English language, they do not enable formatting of characters from other languages, particularly those using a non-Latin based alphabet. This limitation certainly impacts the ease-of-use of IP applications in countries where people do not use the English language.

To expand support of DNS for non-Latin languages, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defines a set of standards (RFCs) to enable Internet users from anywhere in the world to issue DNS queries in their native languages. These RFCs comprise the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) specifications which defines a translation mechanism from native character sets, defined as unicode characters, into ASCII format so they can be communicated via the DNS protocol.

This white paper describes the process for formulating internationalized domain names and related IDNA administration issues and solutions.