Editing Internationalized domain name (section)

==Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications==
Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) is a mechanism defined in 2003 for handling internationalized domain names containing non-[[ASCII]] characters.

Although the [[Domain Name System]] supports non-ASCII characters, applications such as [[e-mail]] and [[web browser]]s restrict the characters that can be used as domain names for purposes such as a [[hostname]]. Strictly speaking, it is the network protocols these applications use that have restrictions on the characters that can be used in domain names, not the applications that have these limitations or the DNS itself.{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} To retain backward compatibility with the installed base, the IETF IDNA Working Group decided that internationalized domain names should be converted to a suitable ASCII-based form that could be handled by web browsers and other user applications.{{citation needed|date=January 2020}} IDNA specifies how this conversion between names written in non-ASCII characters and their ASCII-based representation is performed. {{citation needed|date=January 2020}}

An IDNA-enabled application can convert between the internationalized and [[ASCII]] representations of a domain name. It uses the ASCII form for DNS lookups but can present the internationalized form to users who presumably prefer to read and write domain names in non-ASCII scripts such as Arabic or Hiragana. Applications that do not support IDNA will not be able to handle domain names with non-ASCII characters, but will still be able to access such domains if given the (usually rather cryptic) ASCII equivalent.