From whichever part of the world you belong, no matter what is your mother tongue, if you are reading this post, this means you understands English.

Nearly half of the world doesn't know English But still accessing Internet was not very much friendly for those non-English speaking community to an extent due to the limitation of only having ASCII characters in domain names until few years back.

In simple term, before 2011 domains was restricted to be in English language only.

In 2011, ICANN approved addition of IDN gTLDs (Internationalized Domain Name generic Top-Level Domain)in the root zone. And this gives the luxury to the internet community to have a domain url in any language.

ICANN has delegated IDN in seven languages to NIXI. Details of those are as follows:

From 15th August 2014 onwards, NIXI will accept registration for .भारत IDN

This means india.gov.in will have a corresponding भारतसरकार.भारत domain in Devanagari script. And any user across the world can also access india.gov.in website by typing भारतसरकार.भारत in the browser URL. This will increase the penetration of the Internet through the use of local languages and help penetrate local content.

IDN Mapping with existing DNS Setup

IDN provide us the freedom to have a domain in any language. But existing DNS infrastructure doesn't support language other than English. And it is not easy to change/upgrade whole DNS nfrastructure across the internet community.

For sorting out this issue, punycode comes into the picture.

Punycode is a simple and efficient transfer encoding syntax designed for use with Internationalized Domain Names in Applications (IDNA). It uniquely and reversibly transforms a Unicode string into an ASCII string. ASCII characters in the Unicode string are represented literally, and non-ASCII characters are represented by ASCII characters that are allowed in host name labels (letters, digits, and hyphens).

For more info, please refer :- -

For running a authoritative DNS for .भारत IDN, you will have to make a zone in your server with 'xn--h2brj9c' name. (Obviously you are not going to do this as this will only be done by DNS Servers which ar actually authoritative for the same).

When you type सरकार.भारत in the url, your browser will automatically convert IDN domain in punycode format and do the DNS Query (of course browser needs to be intelligent enough for doing this).