The Internationalized Domain Name or IDN system was primarily developed as a way to bypass the restrictions on character allowances in host names to allow the use of non-English alphabets. The IDN is a domain name that potentially contains characters not found in “a” through “z”. It can also contain letters with diacritics as required by many European languages. Characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese are also expected to be found here.

The present standard for domain names does not allow such characters. There are two (2) possible ways around this limitation – change the standard or agree on a way to convert IDNs into standard domain names.