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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. 

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

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