[UA-discuss] IDNs & i18n

[Andre Schappo]

My focus in this email will be IDNs and Internationalisation.

As I have previously stated, a fundamental problem is the lack of Internationalisation in University Computer Science teaching. Computer Science departments are still dominated by 7bit ASCII text processing. There should be in depth study and practice of Unicode text processing in Computer Science departments. Students graduating from such ASCII cultures will not have the skills necessary to properly implement IDNs. Even worse they will not even think about non ASCII text and how to design systems that will process non ASCII text. So the UA problem, along with lots of other problems, are embedded into systems right from the start.

Unicode is a part of internationalisation of Computer Science. For years I have been encouraging Computer Science educators to internationalise their teaching with little success.

I recently changed my tactics. There are groups that promote "Internationalisation of the Curriculum" i.e. all curricula and not just Computer Science. I am reaching out to some of these groups and maybe UASG should also reach out to these groups. I have written an initial short blog article — http://schappo.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/computer-science-curriculum.html

I have not yet had much response from the groups I have contacted but it is still early days.

When I get time I will write further blog articles i.e.

① advantages of internationalising Computer Science teaching
② the negative consequences of not internationalising Computer Science teaching — one of these being the lack of support for IDNs and EAI in so many systems

We need every Computer Science student to graduate with an understanding of internationalisation and hence Unicode and hence IDNs. We need this critical mass. I am one of few.

André Schappo


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