Netflix Upgrades to Full Member of the Unicode Consortium

The Unicode Consortium is pleased to announce that Netflix has upgraded from associate member to a full corporate member.

Netflix is the world’s leading Internet television network with over 93 million members in over 190 countries enjoying more than 125 million hours of TV shows and movies per day, including original series, documentaries and feature films.

We look forward to their contributions to the Unicode Standard, ICU, the Common Locale data project, and are grateful for their financial support of the Consortium’s work. Full members of the consortium have a vote in all technical committees, and in the governance of the consortium.

Be a Part of IUC 41! Call for Participation

The Internationalization and Unicode Conference® (IUC) is the annual conference of the Unicode Consortium where experts and industry leaders gather to map the future of internationalization, ignite new ideas and present the latest in technologies and best practices for creation, management, and testing of global, web, and multilingual software solutions.

Join in with other industry leaders to present your ideas and solutions at the 41st Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC 41) in Santa Clara, California, October 16-18, 2017.

Please submit your proposals for presentations or tutorials by Friday, March 24, 2017. Topics can include case studies, best practices, innovative technology, or evolving standards.

Full details and information about how to submit an abstract can be found on the IUC 41 Call for Participation page.

Proposed update of UTS #46, for Unicode domain names

UTS #46 “Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing” is used by many applications to support internationalized domain names with non-English characters. The proposed update to Version 10.0 regenerates the UTS #46 data files based on new additions to the Unicode repertoire, and adds three new parameters for processing: CheckHyphens, CheckBidi, and CheckJoiners. These parameters allow implementations to reflect current practice in browsers. The note about the use of IDNA2008 now includes the number of “missing” IDNA2008 characters (26,568), and is reworded for clarity.

There are two review notes requesting feedback on the use of Joiner characters.

For details and information about how to provide feedback, please see Public Review Issue #347.

Unicode Locale Data v31α available for testing

The Alpha version of Unicode CLDR version 31 is available for testing. The beta v31 will contain updates to the LDML spec and should be available on March 1, with the release of v31 planned for March 15.

CLDR 31 provides an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

Aside from the regular updates to codes and data, some of the more noticeable changes are:

• Canonical codes
  • The subdivision codes were changed to consistently use the bcp47 format.
  • The locales in the language-territory population data and the exemplars directory were regularized (dropping likely scripts subtags).
  • The timezone ID for GMT has been split from UTC.
  • There is a new mechanism for identifying hybrid locales, such as Hinglish.
• Subdivisions
  • Names for Scotland, Wales, and England have been added in many languages.
• Emoji 5.0
  • Short names and keywords have been updated for English.
  • Collation (sorting) adds the new 5.0 Emoji characters and sequences, and some fixes for Emoji 4.0 characters and sequences.
• Transforms
  • The Zawgyi→Unicode transform has been improved.
  • Tamil can now be transcribed to the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

This release did not have a data-submission cycle, so the changes reflect cleanup and bug fixes. For more details, and important notes for smoothly migrating implementations, see Unicode CLDR Version 31. If you find a problem, please file a ticket.