Egypt has begun making its national archives digitally available on the Internet in Arabic, having last month registered the world's first domain name in Arabic script. The initiative to boost use of Arabic on the Web was launched Monday following the domain name registration, which opened the Internet to millions of Arabic speakers put off by a language barrier. Analysts say Arabic is just 1 per cent of Web content. Egypt has adopted the domain name .misr – the Arabic word for Egypt and which will be spelt in Arabic script. Internet regulator ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, says the new Arabic domains are expected to start working during 2010. Technology services firm IBM and Egypt's government led the project for digitally documenting the National Archives to set up a database for the country's cultural heritage. ICANN, which oversees Web addresses and records the names of their sponsors, voted to allow non-Latin script to be used in Web addresses in mid
