The Top-Level Domain (TLD) “XN—NGBC5AZD” is an Internationalized domain name (IDN) TLD. In Punycode — the representation used for these sorts of domains — it corresponds to شبكة. IDN TLDs allow non-English speakers to navigate the internet using their native scripts or languages.
The implied translation for “XN—NGBC5AZD” to English is “web/network,” but it is originally Arabic. Internationalized Country Code Top-Level Domain Names (IDN ccTLDs) are a key aspect of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) internationalization program. ICANN is aiming to make the internet more inclusive by allowing web addresses in non-Latin scripts. To identify this potential inclusivity, it’s beneficial to understand that as of October 2018, only 53.6% of worldwide web content was in English, despite English speakers constituting a lesser portion of global internet users (Internet World Stats).
The source for this TLD’s encoding is the Unicode Standard. Unicode provides a unique encoding for every character from every language, allowing uniform expression of all world’s languages across all operating systems and software. This standardization makes translating and referencing domains like “XN—NGBC5AZD” easier and more consistent.
To navigate to non-Latin-scripted domain names, users would need to transliterate them via the Punycode encoding system. Punycode is a bootstring encoding of Unicode intended for use with IDN, and designed for the domain name system, which only supports ASCII characters. This way, languages with non-ascii characters (like Arabic, Chinese, etc.) could have their own web addresses.
Punycode can represent over a billion combinations of ASCII characters, thus encompassing all writing systems worldwide. It begins with an ‘xn—’ prefix, followed by encoded Unicode character string, as seen in “XN—NGBC5AZD”. It’s an instance of Bootstring, an algorithm for conversion of strings for languages/scripts beyond ASCII in a reversible manner.
Dissecting the term “XN—NGBC5AZD”, “XN” denotes it’s an IDN label, the rest is the encoded form of the Unicode string (here, شبكة) in Punycode. ICANN’s online IDN conversion tool can be utilized to transform between Punycode IDN TLDs and their human-readable form.
In conclusion, “XN—NGBC5AZD” is an IDN TLD leveraging ICANN’s program of internet inclusivity. Its human-readable form is ‘شبكة’. To successfully convert non-Latin scripts into functional domain names, it uses the Unicode Standard for textual representation and Punycode for DNS-compatible ASCII encoding.
Sources:
- ICANN
- Unicode Standard
- Internet World Stats
- RFC 3492 (Punycode: A Bootstring encoding of Unicode for IDN)
