I will be chairing the LGR work, and for those of you I don't
already know a very brief introduction -- I first began to think
about support for
languages in 1986 – I was writing what became the Single UnixSpecification for a set of
European
OEMs and had to consider whether or not to add APIs to Unix for
8-bit single-byte coded
characters (8859-*) to the existing 7-bit APIs for single-byte
coded characters
(ASCII).I revisited the
problem
again six years later, after the locale model had been added for
single and
multi-byte encodings, e.g., EUC and SJIS, and again, as an
architect at Sun,
when I elected to create the default UTF8 locale for Solaris. Over the next several years I
consulted
to HP’s Cupertino Systems Labs and IBM’s Palo Alto Research
Center, making
contributions to the i18n/l10n architectures and implementations
of HP-UX and
AIX.
I became involved with the Unicode Consortium when
it began to
consider adopting proposed draft standards for encoding two
writing systems I
had some prior familiarity with – the Cherokee and a Unified
Northern
syllabaries.It was
through
participation in the UTC that I became aware of the issues
presented by scripts
with combining and/or context dependent characters,
directionality, scripts not
yet supported by Unicode, etc.
Not all my work was pure Operating Systems and their
internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n), I worked at SRI
during the transitions from hosttables to the DNS and participated
in the efforts that lead to the NTIA's selection of ICANN as a
contractor. I contributed to the IETF working groups on domain
registration and internationalized domain names, and have worked for
registries and registrars over the past decade and a half, and have
participated in ICANN through the GNSO and through At-Large.
My SOI is here:
https://community.icann.org/display/gnsosoi/Eric+Brunner-Williams+SOI
Enough about me,
please, and on to the work. I encourage those of you who are not
attending ICANN-52 to follow the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop session,
as the experiences of the Arabic Script group will inform those of
us working on the Latin Script, and the presentations by Wil Tan and
Michel Suignard will be of general interest. Those who are attending
ICANN-52 I strongly urge they attend the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop,
and get to know each other during this opportunity for face-to-face
interaction.
Please note that the IDN Root Zone LGR workshop is scheduled for
Wednesday, February 11th, at 13:00 UTC+8.
For those east of the Atlantic Ocean -- Europe, Africa, Asia -- the
meeting will in fact take place on Wednesday, February 11th, at
13:00 UTC+8
For those west of the Atlantic Ocean -- the Americas -- the meeting
will in fact take place the previous day, e.g., at 9pm in Los
Angeles (UTC-8).
I thank you all for volunteering for this important, and quite vast
undertaking, as Latin script forms the basis for languages from
Abenaki (spoken in Northern New England & Quebec and the
Maritimes) to Vietnamese, in each inhabited continent of the globe.
Staff has been kind enough to forward to me each of your SOIs and/or
CVs, and I will be writing each of you in the next few days.