One of my treats each year is to attend the Internationalization and Unicode Conference. This year was the 41st conference, or IUC41.  As I often do, I made a presentation. This year, the title was, Universal Acceptance of non-Latin email addresses and domain names: how does your framework rate? I’d like to share my slides.

My abstract was:

The next one billion internet users use a wide variety of languages and scripts. They will demand email addresses, and domain names, in scripts they can easily read. App development frameworks, libraries, and programming languages on all platforms will be called on to meet this challenge. This is Universal Acceptance (UA) of all domain names and email addresses, from http://普遍接受-测试。世界 or مانيش @ أشوكا. الهند or données@fußballplatz.technology. We present technical compliance criteria, a list of problem areas, and ways to evaluate compliance. We give our compliance findings so far. Does your library and platform provide Universal Acceptance?

You can find the slides at  http://go.jdlh.com/iuc41s10t2 (PDF, 6.3MB).

I was glad to have 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. In addition to this presentation, I gave a tutorial, which I will cover in a separate blog.

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