ASCII TLD

An ASCII TLD is a [[tld|top-level domain]] composed entirely of characters from the ASCII character set (A–Z, 0–9, and hyphens), as opposed to [[idn-tld|IDN TLDs]] that use non-Latin scripts. The vast majority of TLDs in the root zone are ASCII-based. ASCII TLDs are natively compatible with all [[dns|DNS]] software and require no special encoding, whereas IDN TLDs must be converted to their [[punycode|Punycode]] representation (e.g., xn--...) when transmitted through DNS infrastructure.