Website addresses can now be in Thai

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Website addresses can now be in Thai
By ASINA PORNWASIN
THE NATION
Published on January 18, 2011
After more than 20 years since the Internet was launched, Thai users will now be able to trawl cyberspace in their own language.

THNIC, a private company that runs the "dot.th" domain, will today unveil its plan for "dot.thai", which would allow URLs to be in Thai script and help narrow the digital language divide.

According to managing director Parkpoom Tripatana, THNIC (www.thaiurl.th) has up to 8,000 domains in the Thai language and would allow another 44,000 domain names using "dot.th" to be registered in the Thai language. There should be more domains available in the Thai language after March 11.

WEBSITES IN THAI SCRIPT

"Under '.th', we have seven sub-domain names - or.th, co.th, in.th, go.th, ac.th, net.th and mi.th. In all, there are about 44,000 websites across all seven types of domain names, including URLs in the English language, such as www.thnic.co.th," Parkpoom said.

He explained that from now on, users could search for website addresses in Thai script. According to Parkpoom, this would help users who are not familiar with the English language to make the most of the huge font of information that is the Internet.

"This should bridge the digital divide. In the past, websites had to contain words in the English language and their addresses had to be in English, but from now on all of this could be in Thai," he said.

Poomjit Sirawongprasert, president of the Internet Hosting Service Provider Club, said this marked a major change in Internet history, bringing people closer to the online world so they are able to access information available over the Internet.

THNIC will act as the Thai language and .th domain registrar, while the Thai Network Information Centre Foundation (THNIC Foundation) will act as a policy-maker and set up guidelines.

It is possible to set up URLs in Thai script thanks to the internationalised domain names (IDNs) as implemented by the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). This allows domain names to contain letters or characters from non-ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) script, such as Thai.

Poomjit said this was different from the attempts made previously to change online languages. Earlier, only applications could be designed and developed as plug-ins that could turn a Thai URL into an English-language URL.

"That model has not worked well, as it is not practical and not very easy to use. But this new service approved by ICANN will be done in the very heart of the Internet infrastructure technology, and should be widely adopted around the world, including Thailand," Poomjit said.

PROMOTING THAI BUSINESS

The beauty of this is to help promote and accelerate Thai business, reduce the gap between English speakers and non-English speakers and give them an equal chance to access information and knowledge over the Internet.

So far, 33 countries have filed requests representing 22 languages. This will enable countries and territories that use languages based on scripts other than Latin to offer users domain names in non-Latin characters. This should make the Internet more user-friendly in more nations around the world.

http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2011/01/18/business/Website-addresses-can-now-be-in-Thai-30146601.html