Argentina is about to join the ranks of countries that allow the full Spanish alphabet character set — including the ñ, accented vowels and the ü — in its Internet domain names.

Domain names are what are commonly thought of as Internet or Web addresses; for example, the domain name of this site is about.com. (Technically, the "com" part of the address is the upper-level domain, while "about" is the second-level domain.) The system for domain names was developed at a time when few websites existed in languages other than English, and as a result it wasn't even possible until a few years ago to have a domain name in anything other than the English alphabet.

That's slowly changing. The United States, Spain and Chile were among the first to permit the use of Spanish spelling in domain names, although its use has been slow to catch on. Among the popular sites to take advantage of the system is the Royal Spanish Academy at http://realacademiaespañola.es, although a shorter version, http://www.rae.es, is easier to type.

As one of the most-wired Spanish-speaking countries, Argentina's use of Internationalized Domain Names, known as IDNs, could make them more familiar. According to an article that appeared recently in La Nación of Buenos Aires, about 119,000 domains in Argentina, or 7 percent of the 1.7 million domains in the country, are in the process of changing their domain names so that correct Spanish spelling is used starting in September. And as an intermediate step, government websites that used to end in gov.ar will now end in gob.ar — those first three letters now standing for gobierno rather than the English word "government."

The newspaper quoted the Foreign Relations Ministry saying that the new domain names will "strengthen the use of our language and defend our identity." The new system also was implemented to encourage good use of the language by Argentine youth — of the 16 million Internet users in Argentina, half are under the age of 24.

If you're a computer user in a place such as Argentina or Spain, you probably already know how to type accented letters; keyboards in those countries typically have keys for accented letters and the ñ, and computers are typically configured to allow their use with ease. But setting up a made-for-English computer to easily write Spanish requires installing a special keyboard configuration or typing hard-to-remember numeric codes.

And there's another problem: The most popular Web browser, Internet Explorer, doesn't yet seamlessly handle the international domain names. You can type in the name and successfully reach a foreign-named site, but then the domain name will display incorrectly. For example, http://realacademiaespañola.es will display as http://xn--realacademiaespaola-b4b.es.

The latest versions of the Opera and Firefox browsers, both of which are usually a step ahead of their Microsoft competition, don't have that problem, though. If you insist on using Internet Explorer with international sites, however, you can download free i-Nav software from VeriSign that "plugs into" Internet Explorer to make it display the name correctly. That software also lets you send and receive email using IDNs.

The incorrect display with Internet Explorer gives a clue as to how the international domain names are set up behind the scenes, though. Technically, all domain names that don't have standard English letters in them are actually domain names that begin with xm--, because system as it was set up doesn't allow the direct use of accented letters (or Japanese words and such either). So the browser takes the international name, converts it to a name using standard English characters and then converts it back to the foreign language for you. For example, if you had a website such as http://www.uña.es, its real domain would be http://www.xn--ua-zja.es/. When your browser connects with a site whose domain name begins with xn--, it knows to convert it to a more readable form for you.