Skip to main content

Web Addresses

In this episode, Web Addresses . . .

Have you ever wondered why internet web addresses are in English?

While poking around on the web, we discovered a riveting segment (if you're a Geek) from howstuffwork.com to tickle your RAM (Random Access Memory).

Ok - "Why are internet web addresses in English?"

The short answer: Web addresses are in English because the people who developed the standards for web addresses were, for the most part, English-speaking Americans.

Are you ready for a longer answer?

In the early days of the internet, the only way to connect to a remote computer was to know its unique Internet Protocol or IP address, a long string of unique digits such as 165.254.202.218. But in 1983, as the number of computers on the network continued to grow, the University of Wisconsin developed the Domain Name System (DNS), which maps numeric IP addresses to more easily remembered domain names like google.com.

In 1990, according to the Computer History Museum, British scientist (and English speaker) Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. By 1992, more than one million computers were connected, the majority in the United States.

In 1994, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a standards organization made up of representatives from several U.S. government agencies, published a set of standards for web addresses, called Uniform Resource Locators or URLs.

This made web addresses easy to read, write, type, and remember; the engineering task force restricted URLs to a small number of characters, namely the uppercase and lowercase letters of the English (or Latin) alphabet, the digits 0 through 9, and a few symbols.

The allowable characters are based on the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as the ASCII character set, developed in the United States and first published in 1963.

This all worked fine for English-speaking countries, but as of 2009, more than half of the 1.6 billion internet users worldwide spoke a language with a character set other than the English (or Latin) alphabet.

To understand what using the web is like for those individuals, imagine that you have to navigate the web using only Arabic. The content of your favorite sites is still in English, but the web address for every site you use is made up of entirely unfamiliar characters that may not even be found on your keyboard.

That scenario, in reverse, is essentially what the Internet experience has been like for web users who read and write using not only another language but an entirely different alphabet or set of characters. (Visit a website like Egypt's el-balad.com, for example, and the distinction between the site content, which is entirely in Arabic, and the web address, which uses only English characters, becomes immediately apparent.)

Given the growing number of non-English users online, it may come as no surprise that English web addresses are no longer the law of the land.

In 2009, ICANN, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that regulates domain names on the internet, approved the use of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), meaning that web addresses would be able to contain non-English characters like Chinese, Korean, Arabic, or Cyrillic script.

There you have it, are you wonderstruck? Probably not, but now you know why internet web addresses for a long time were only in English. 

If you enjoy our weekly visits, please share them with a friend.

I'm Patrick Ball; thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Most Popular of All Time

Confidently Wrong: The Art of the AI Tall Tale

In this episode, A chat with Adamas the Chef on hidden recipes causing digital hallucinations. Pull up a chair and pour yourself a fresh cup of coffee—and please, for your own sake, taste it first. We need to have a quiet chat about why your computer sometimes decides to reinvent reality with the confidence of a five-star chef who has clearly lost his mind. In the world of technology, we call it a  hallucination . It sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it? As if the computer decided to ignore your instructions altogether in favor of a vivid, technicolor imagination that simply hasn’t met reality yet. But in truth, an AI hallucination isn’t a breakdown; it’s just a very confident, very polite mistake. Think of it like our friend Adamas , the Chef. Adamas is a master of the kitchen, but he is also a bit of a romantic who refuses to say “I don’t know.” When you ask him for a classic recipe he hasn’t made in years, he doesn’t stop to consult a cookbook—that’s far too pedestrian. Instead, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ode To Gemology

For over 80 years, students of gemology have struggled with spectrums, bewildered by birefringence, and simply plagued by pleochroism. The following sonnet is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face, a glow to your heart, and a simple reminder that students of life and gemology rediscover nature's gifts every day.  Ode to Gemology , by a GIA on-campus student. Dispersion, fire, adventurescence. Orient, sheen, or iridescence. Refractive index, high or low. The luster should indicate that, you know. Polarization, double or single. What to do now, they intermingle. Pleochroic colors you really should see. Was that only two, or actually three? Birefringence should help you a lot. Use your polarizer and watch the spot. Now, did it jump most on low or high? Sure, you can get it if you really try! Your liquids should be an aid, I think. Does it float, suspend, or slowly sink? Just use your imagination now. (He doesn't see me wiping my brow.) Solid inclusions or only bubbles? Huh, th...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cowardice of Corporate Jargon

Picture this: an email lands in your inbox. A colleague—maybe even a friend—needs a favor, a second set of eyes, a moment of your time. You sigh, stare at the glow of your monitor, and type: “I’d love to help, but I just don’t have the bandwidth right now.” Hit send. Problem solved. Conscience clear. Except it shouldn’t be. Most of us have said or sent that line at least once, hoping it would land gently. On the surface, it’s perfect—efficient, polite, even self-aware. And that’s exactly the problem. It lets you decline without ever quite telling the truth. You didn’t just say no; you softened the discomfort of being human until it barely felt like a feeling at all. Instead of admitting, I’m overwhelmed , or I don’t have the energy , you reach for the sterile vocabulary of a server room. You turn a feeling into a metric. A boundary into a system limitation. Apologies, my data transfer rate is capped. Please submit a ticket to my emotional help desk. It’s a clever little trick—and an un...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tuck, Roll, and Rain

In this episode, the interactive obstacle course of the San Marcos bike path. (Sunday, April 12, 2026) It started out as a beautiful day for a ride—our usual 30-mile Sunday trek to Escondido. The weather was moody, with brooding dark clouds threatening rain, but the streets were mostly empty. The traffic was light, and the bike paths were eerily quiet. It gave off the distinct, yet entirely false, illusion of a peaceful sanctuary. We were headed home, and I had settled into a smooth, hypnotic cadence on the path across from Palomar College in San Marcos. I was listening to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field, minding my own business, and dressed to be seen. Between my colorful jersey and my cherry-red vest, I was illuminated like a human traffic cone. You could spot me from low Earth orbit. Apparently, that wasn't visible enough. Up ahead, I spotted another cyclist. He was cruising along in a state of pure, unhelmeted zen—completely unburdened by the earthly concepts of peripheral vision ...
Post a Comment
Read more