UA Colleagues:

My (other) proposal was accepted, and I will be doing a tutorial on Universal Acceptance for the 44th Internationalisation and Unicode Conference, on October 14–16, 2020. I would appreciate suggestions from any of you about what UA topics are effective with this kind of audience. If you have slides or demo scripts which I can re-use, that is even better.

Here is what I know about what the Conference expects from me:

Audience: small, likely 10-40 people in this tutorial, maybe 200-300 people total in the conference. But they are a top-class group of experts in internationalisation, localisation, fonts, and language. Attendees include the architects and implementers of language support from major (US) tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Netflix, as well as expert academics. Some may have designed the specs for IDNs and EAI. They might not know the term "Universal Acceptance" yet (though once we are successful in our UASG efforts, they all will). But once they know the term, they will be 100% in favour. We don't need to spend much effort persuading them.

Purpose: the tutorials are longer sessions on the first day of the conference. They are intended to take someone who knows the general subject of internationalisation and Unicode, and give them enough background and explanation that they can understand the cutting-edge topics in the remaining conference sessions.

Time: 90 minutes.

Format: usually a lecture in a meeting room, with no webcast and no remote participation. Slides projected onto a screen. Most participants will have their own laptops and be comfortable using them, so a participation exercise would be a great way to wake everyone up. However, given the COVID-19 pandemic, it is possible the whole conference will shift to video participation from home. Or it might be cancelled altogether. It's really hard to predict.

Possible Topics

• Context: the next one billion Internet users, and universal acceptance
• Exercise: give people a list of TLDs, ask them to find out: how may TLDs? How many have xn-- prefix? What is longest TLD? etc.
• The five key tasks of Universal Acceptance: Accept, Validate, Store, Process, Display. (Do these really resonate? Do we still talk about them?)
  
• Explain IDNA, how it builds on ASCII-only DNS. U-labels and A-labels. Punycode.
• Deep dive on Punycode algorithm, so they really understand how it works (but may not have time for this).
• Guidance for making your apps IDNA compatible. How to use UASG test cases to test your app.
• DNS Label generation rules (LGR), and using them to build your own policy on naming, avoiding confusables, etc.
  
• Explain EAI, how it uses IDNs, how it builds on ASCII-only addresses. EAI phase 1 vs phase 2.
• Deep dive on the specs for EAI support in mail servers, e.g. SMTPUIT8 support.
• Issues involved for email providers in implementing EAI in their services. How it touches anti-spam, calendars, etc.
• Best practices for Email admins, and doc being prepared by EAI WG.
  
• UA use cases and UASG004.
• Case studies: XgenPlus, Coremail, Raseel, Microsoft Office365 & Hotmail, etc.
• EAI Training Environment and EAI Test-Bed Server, for hands-on learning (as Abdalmonem Galila reported at ICANN67)
  
• Encourage attendees to register their own EAI email accounts, from XgenPlus etc, and try it out.
• What else?

Obviously this is way more content than I can fit into 90 minutes. I will need to cut out topics to fit my time. But right now, i am looking for other topics which work well in a tutorial setting, and material which I can re-use.

Please send any suggestions to me, on or off the list.

I will, of course, be glad to contribute these presentations back to the UASG for re-use. It might be possible to take a video of this tutorial, if the Conference allows it. Then I'd be happy for that to get added to the UASG library also.

Best regards,
       —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada

-- 
    --Jim DeLaHunt, jdlh@jdlh.com     http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/)
      multilingual websites consultant

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