In practice, the IDNA system associates a specific combination of ASCII characters with each character not supported by the DNS standard .
The conversion occurs in the user's browser, which translates non-ASCII characters into ASCII characters. An IDN domain name will begin with the prefix xn-- , followed by the set of ASCII characters that represent the actual name.
For example, the domain name città.it will correspond to the following characters: xn--citt-3na.it
IDN domains can be reached directly by typing special characters belgium phone number list within the web address. Returning to the previous example, the domain città.it will be reachable by typing in the browser.
In some older browsers, it may happen that after typing the domain with non-ASCII characters, the name written is converted to ASCII characters in the address bar . In this case, the user who types città.it will see the domain converted to xn--citt-3na.it directly in the browser's address bar.
Currently, however, most browsers leave any special characters present in the domain name unchanged.
Advantages and Disadvantages of IDN Domains
The great advantage of IDN domains is that they have a higher registration availability than domains with ASCII characters. Also, in the case of online brand protection, if the brand in question contains accents or special characters it would be better to register the IDN version of the domain name corresponding to the brand name.
Using IDN domains also has its disadvantages . Keyboards from different countries do not contain the same special characters, so it may happen, for example, that an Italian user with an Italian keyboard is not able to type, for example, characters from the Greek alphabet, Cyrillic or special characters.