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But 12 years later, the vast majority of the web remains wedded to the Roman alphabet -- and ICANN<\/a>, the organisation in charge of protecting the internet's infrastructure, is on a mission to change it.
\"The truth of the matter is that even if half the world's population uses the internet today, it's the elite of the world -- mainly those living in cities, mainly those with a good income,\" Goran Marby, head of the US-based non-profit, told AFP in an interview.
\"Shouldn't we give people the opportunity to use their own scripts, their own keyboards, their own narratives?\"
It's thanks to ICANN -- the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- that when you type an address at the top of the screen, your computer can find the web page you're looking for.
These days it's theoretically possible to type an address in more than 150 scripts, including obscure ones like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and watch the page load.
But large parts of the internet remain incompatible with writing systems other than the Latin alphabet. Many US websites, for example, would not allow you to make a purchase or subscribe to their newsletter if you entered an email address in Tamil or Hebrew.
When a group of bodies including ICANN tested the world's top 1,000 websites last year, only 11 percent accepted a Chinese or Arabic email address when trying, for example, to contact them via an online form.
Western-centric since conception<\/strong>
One of ICANN's priorities for the coming years is to ensure that 28 commonly used writing scripts are usable across the internet.
The problem isn't restricted to the West: in China even WeChat, the country's most popular messaging app, does not recognise email addresses written in Chinese characters.
Chinese web addresses often use strings of numbers, like the dating site 5201314.com.
This is partly because it can be hard to remember how to spell a web address in pinyin, the romanised version of Chinese, and partly because number-based puns work well in Mandarin (\"520\" sounds like \"I love you\").
In many parts of the world, people have simply tried to adapt to an internet that doesn't speak their language.
\"It never even crossed my mind,\" said Cairo finance worker Hadeer al-Shater, when asked whether she had considered setting up an Arabic-script email account.
\"The whole point is to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. And unfortunately, Arabic is not very practical on the internet,\" she said.
Marby points out that the internet of today grew largely out of the work of US and European computer scientists. As a result, it has disproportionately benefited those who can read and write in Latin-based scripts.
An estimated 37 percent of the world's population -- 2.9 billion people -- have still never used the internet, according to the UN's International Telecommunication Union<\/a>, 96 percent of them in developing countries.
And Marby argues that this number will remain high if people who don't use the Latin alphabet are locked out.
\"We think it's very important to make sure that the original idea of the internet -- to connect people -- doesn't get forgotten,\" he said.
Good for business?<\/strong>
Progress has been made on some fronts. Users of Google's popular Gmail<\/a> service, for example, have been able to exchange messages with people whose email addresses use non-Latin characters since 2014.
In Russia, about 40 percent of companies have a version of their website that uses a Cyrillic \"top-level domain\" (TLD) - meaning the suffix of a website, such as \".com\" or \".org\".
But while most Russian hosting services allow email addresses with a Cyrillic domain, the part before the \"at\" symbol remains in the Latin alphabet, the Russian Coordination Center for TLDs explains on its website.
Marby stresses that \"universal acceptance\" -- the idea of all scripts being usable across the internet -- will never happen unless companies help fix the issue on their end.
\"We have to continue to work with software developers and manufacturers to make sure they actually do this,\" he said.
In the long-run, he argues, universal acceptance will be good for business by allowing companies to reach new markets.
\"But this is not something that we're doing over the next six months,\" he said. \"This is going to take years.\"
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但12年后,绝大多数的网络仍然执着于罗马字母,互联网名称与数字地址分配机构,该组织负责保护互联网的基础设施、的使命是改变它。
“事实的真相是,即使世界上一半的人口使用互联网的今天,它是世界的精英——主要是那些生活在城市,主要是那些有一个好的收入,“Goran Marby,美国非营利组织负责人在采访中告诉法新社。
“我们不应该给人们机会去使用自己的脚本,自己的键盘,自己的故事?”
这是由于ICANN(互联网名称与数字地址分配机构,当你输入一个地址在屏幕的顶部,你的电脑可以找到你正在寻找的网页。
这些天在理论上是可能的输入一个地址在150多个脚本,包括模糊的像古埃及象形文字,看页面加载。
但互联网的大部分地区仍然不兼容其他比拉丁字母书写系统。许多美国网站,例如,不允许你购买或订阅简报如果你输入一个电子邮件地址在泰米尔语和希伯来语。乐动扑克
当一群身体包括ICANN测试去年世界排名前1000的网站,只有11%接受汉语或阿拉伯语的电子邮件地址时,例如,通过在线形式联系他们。
以西方为中心概念以来
ICANN未来几年的工作重点之一是确保28常用编写脚本都在互联网上可用的。
这个问题并不局限于西方:甚至在中国微信,这个国家最受欢迎的消息传递应用程序,不承认电子邮件地址写在汉字。
中国网络地址经常使用字符串的数字,比如5201314. com的交友网站。
这部分是因为很难记住如何拼写拼音的网址,拉丁语之后的中国,部分原因是根据双关语的工作在普通话(“520”听起来像“我爱你”)。
在世界的许多地方,人们只是试图适应互联网不会说他们的语言。
说,“它甚至从来没有闪过我的头脑开罗金融工作者偃角al-Shater,当被问到她是否曾考虑建立一个阿拉伯文字的电子邮件帐户。
“整个问题是能够与世界其他国家的交流。不幸的是,阿拉伯语不是很实用的在互联网上,”她说。
Marby指出,今天的互联网增长主要从美国和欧洲的计算机科学家的工作。因此,它过分偏袒那些可以在拉丁文字读和写。
估计有37%的世界人口29亿人,还从未使用过互联网,据联合国国际电信联盟,其中96%是在发展中国家。
和Marby认为这个数字将居高不下如果不使用拉丁字母的人是锁定。
“我们认为这是非常重要的,以确保互联网的最初的想法——连接的人不会忘记,”他说。
业务好吗?
在一些方面已经取得了进展。谷歌用户的欢迎Gmail服务,例如,已经能够与人交换消息的电子邮件地址从2014年开始使用非拉丁字符。
在俄罗斯,大约40%的公司有一个版本的网站使用斯拉夫字母“顶级域名”(TLD)——这意味着一个网站的后缀,如“。com”或“.org”。
但当大多数俄罗斯斯拉夫字母域名托管服务允许电子邮件地址,“在”前的部分仍是拉丁字母,象征俄罗斯tld协调中心在其网站上解释说。
Marby强调,“普遍接受”——这个想法在互联网上可用的所有脚本,将永远不会发生,除非公司帮助解决这个问题。
“我们必须继续与软件开发商和制造商确保他们真的这样做,”他说。
他认为,从长远来看普遍接受将有利于企业通过允许公司进入新市场。
“但这不是我们做在接下来的六个月,”他说。“这将需要数年时间。”
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