[UA-discuss] Maybe email addresses and URLs might not matter anymore?

[John Levine]

In article <4b745186-9adb-b8d3-3af4-fd89d334a0ea at jdlh.com> you write:
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>UA Colleagues:
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>We spend a lot of time thinking about universal acceptance of email 
>addresses and URLs. We tend to assume that email addresses and URLs are 
>important. But for a lot of information technology users, they aren't. 
>Those users learned to use IT via mobile, rather than via desktop 
>computers. They use all-embracing messaging apps like WeChat, ...

China is a very large special case, because literally everyone in
China has a Wechat acccount and that's their online identity. Statista
says they have 1.2 billion active users.

To the extent they use e-mail, it's to communicate with people in
other countries.

>I think a useful response to this might be to keep asking ourselves, how 
>do people communicate in preference to emails? How do people find things 
>in preference to typing in URLs?  Then investigating those methods for 
>Universal Acceptance as well.

I would prefer to limit the mission creep here. Mobile apps and walled
gardens are targeted by their owners at specific communities (perhaps
very large ones, but specific anyway) and I don't see that we have
anything useful to tell them. If they consider speakers of language X
to be part of their target audience, they'll add support for language
X. That's doubly true if the interface they show that audience doesn't
contain domain names or e-mail addreses, since those are the only
things that UA deals with.

R's,
John