Universal Acceptance colleagues: We have an opportunity to review a potentially very influential tool for promoting UA. The Unicode Consortium is drafting a proposed Unicode Technical Standard, #58, "Unicode Linkification". As you know, linkification is the process of recognising URLs in plain text, and turning those URLs into active hyperlinks. A big UA problem is that many pieces of software do not linkify Internationalised Domain Names, or globally inclusive email addresses. This is based in part on a limited conception that only latin script letters can appear in domain names or email addresses, and that only a few top level domains are valid. I believe that Unicode Technical Standards are very authoritative in the parts of the software world which we seek to influence. If this UTS gets linkification right, it will be a tool we can use to persuade apps which fall short to do better. If the UTS gets linkification wrong, it will be difficult for us to persuade apps to ignore the UTS and instead do what we say is right. The Unicode Consortium has published a draft of UTS #58, "Unicode Linkification", at <https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr58/>. It is a detailed technical document, including algorithms for detecting the beginning and end of links, and escaping, and data on characters properties. They welcome feedback via a form they link to in the draft. I encourage all UASG participants, with ideas on how linkification should work in order to promote Universal Acceptance, to review the draft and to submit comments. I do not see a specific deadline, but we should not delay. Best regards, —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada -- --Jim DeLaHunt,jdlh@jdlh.com http://blog.jdlh.com/ (http://jdlh.com/) multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, Canada