Ahead of the 10th anniversary of the .РФ Russian ccTLD, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ has unveiled its new project: Поддерживаю.РФ (Support.RF). The project’s main aim is to expand the support of IDN (Internationalized Domain Names) and EAI (E-mail Address Internationalization) in the Russian internet segment, first of all, in .РФ.
The first internationalized gTLDs came into being 10 years ago, on May 12, 2010 when four non-Latin gTLDs were delegated at once. .РФ was one of them. Over a period of the past few years or so, many products and services have started to work with domains and emails in national languages, but today still little software fully supports these domains and emails.
Today, almost 40 percent of Russian companies use .РФ domain names for their websites, but only 20 percent use emails in them. At the same time, most email servers support Cyrillic domains as well as EAI and only need special settings to use these options. This is the result of a survey carried out among IT experts at Russian companies earlier on this year.
The Поддерживаю.РФ project aims to promote more active use of IDN domains and EAI as well as improving their software support. In particular, visitors of the project’s website will be able to learn what IDN and EAI are, which standards and support practices there are today and how software or services can be prepared for Universal Acceptance. After registration, users will be able to take part in developing public software or receive advice from their colleagues or technical consultation from experts of the Coordination Center.
“The project will promote the introduction of any domain names or email addresses in all applications, services and systems. Russian is the main language of communication in Russia, and .РФ is the most popular Russian internationalized domain: it is widely used on the internet, and 15,000–20,000 new domain names are registered there every month. This is why the project puts an emphasis on Cyrillic domain names and emails. Over the ten years since the first IDN appeared, most program products and services have learned how to process them correctly. The developments around internationalized email addresses are slower. There are successful implementations in public software as well as solutions by Google and Microsoft. It is important to understand the fast and wide introduction of existing standards of IDN and EAI support increases the quality, reliability and stability of services provided to final users,” said Project Manager Maria Kolesnikova.
Developers of commercial software, email and web service administrators and contributors of public software who want to improve the support of Cyrillic and other non-Latin domains and emails in national languages in their products are invited to take part in the project.
Join and support .РФ.
