MOSCOW (AFP) - Russia will be able to create its first Internet addresses using the Cyrillic alphabet next year, communications ministry official Vladimir Vassiliev told Interfax news agency on Sunday.

The move follows a decision by the organisation that regulates the Internet to deliver a radical shake-up to the domain-name system.

Russia, which currently uses two top-level domain names .ru and .su, will be able to create a third in Cyrillic by the second quarter of next year, Vassiliev said.

Some Russians have trouble using the Latin alphabet and being able to surf the web entirely in Russian would lead to an increase in the number of users, he said.

At the beginning of June, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, an internet enthusiast, said it was very important for Russia to have domain names in Cyrillic, mainly to reinforce the role of the Russian language in the world.

Russia had 35 million users at the end of last year, about 24 percent of the population. That could climb to 46 million users by the end of this year, the ministry said.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the overhaul at its annual general meeting in Paris on Thursday. It also voted to allow domain names to be lodged in languages such as Arabic or Mandarin Chinese.

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So, is there going to be a way to access these foreign-language domain sites using the Roman characters? Is there going to be an interface program of some type?

I can figure out the Russian version, but the Mandarin and Arabic I'm probably going to need a little help with. Then again, a whole site in Arabic or Mandarin isn't going to really help me either.....

If you don't have a Russian character keyboard handy, don't know how to switch your computer to type in Russian, or just can't memorize where the Russian characters are, then this site works great:
http://translit.ru/

Aside from a few select websites, my feeling is that most users find content through the use of search engines. If you're looking for movie theatres in Ivanovo, for example, you're likely to head over to Yandex, or Google, or whatever and type in "кинотеатр Иваново" and wait for some results. So I don't see this as changing anything for the already web savvy among us, although it could open a whole new world for those who have no interest in learning another alphabet.

Imagine if the net had started in Russia, and all these years we had to type in Гугль.ком every time we wanted to visit a site? It'd drive us crazy.

Z

If you type in Cyrillic enough, it is true... You will remember where all the letters are on the keyboard. I stopped using my keyboard cover two years ago.

It would, but is Гугль.ком going to take us to the same address as google.ru currently does or would it take us to the English version of google.com? That's where there's going to be something to be worked out. Currently, the domain names and sites are all set up for English, even if they contain foreign-language script. Гугль.ком is just the Russian way of typing google.com but it would have to be translated into google.ru to be effective for the average Cyrillic surfer.

I'm sure they're doing this, but what's going to happen when the majority of sites are in Mandarin? Are we going to be inadvertantly redirected through the (filtered) Chinese websites just because we typed the English version of the (more popular) Chinese site?

To be honest, i think it's more limiting than anything else. If a site doesn't have a latin address, only cyrillic-typing users will be access it. So many Russian businesses have their sites in Russian and English for a reason.

How do you type, is it an ESP thing? I want to type like that!!!!

Maybe he uses the "talk to type" text-encoding software that comes with the earpiece.

I don't see this being too much of an issue to be worked out at the infrastructure level. My bet is that individual sites will handle this themselves at the Registrar/DNS level, just like they do for sites with multiple URI's, as in the case of companies that own the .com, .net, and .org addresses.

Z

Where did the the word "cover" go after "keyboard" when you quoted me?
I just know where the letters are. The fingers (all two of them) remember the positions. They only do it a bit slower (because I have to think about the spelling), but they do it!