Last fall I attended the Internationalization and Unicode Conference. That year was the 41st conference, or IUC41.  In addition to a presentation (described in a blog last October), I delivered a tutorial: Email addresses and domain names are NON-latin! Now what?  I should have blogged about my slides last October, but better late than never. Here are my slides.My abstract was:

Email addresses, and domain names, are no longer limited to ASCII Latin script. They can now be http://普遍接受-测试。世界 or مانيش @ أشوكا. الهند or données@fußballplatz.technology. Software, frameworks, and workflows will need to change to accommodate. What are Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and Email Address Internationalization (EAI)? What do you need to know? What do you do next? This tutorial brings you up to speed. It explains IDN and EAI. It shows you the implications. It connects you to sources of information. It helps you understand what this will mean for you. Suitable for software developers, QA, marketers, system administrators, and management.

You can find the slides at  http://go.jdlh.com/iuc41t4t1 (PDF, 8.3MB). In contrast to presentations, IUC tutorials are allotted 2-5 hours, and are intended to help non-specialists from a standing start learn enough to be able to engage with the, presumably more advanced, content in the rest of the conference.

I think that Internationalised Domain Names and Email Address Internationalisation are on the growing edge of the Internationalisation and Unicode Conference’s domain, and that many people aren’t familiar with them yet. A tutorial on the subject is very apt. Like my presentation, this tutorial was an opportunity to highlight Universal Acceptance, the principle that all domain names, email addresses and URLs should be fully accepted by software, no matter what scripts they use. In other words, Internet names and addresses which use non-Latin characters should be as well handled as those which use the legacy Latin characters. Universal acceptance is fundamental to a truly multilingual Internet, and to supporting the next billion Internet users.

I have been volunteering with the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG), a community-led initiative to raise awareness about Universal Acceptance, identify obstacles, and overcome them. It is a project of ICANN, the domain name system organisation. At some other time I’ll give them a proper plug, but for now, just know that you can find out about their work and their resources for developers at https://uasg.tech/.

IUC41 was 16-18 October, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara hotel, Santa Clara, California. My other presentation was Universal Acceptance of non-Latin email addresses and domain names: how does your framework rate?

By the way, the next conference, IUC42, will be 10-12 September, 2018, again at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara hotel, Santa Clara, California. Do you have an idea for a good presentation? The IUC42 Call for Participation is open until 9 March 2018. Details at http://unicodeconference.org/call-for-participation.htm . Maybe I will attend your talk at IUC42!

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