Monday, March 31, 2014

Proposed Updates for Unicode Security-Related Publications

Proposed updates are now available for UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations, and UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms. These are both being updated to correspond with Unicode 7.0.

PRI #272, Proposed Update UTR #36, Unicode Security Considerations:
This UTR is being updated. In this draft, a description has been added about the downside of displaying URLs as Punycode. A note has also been added on the use of Catalan in identifiers.

PRI #273, Proposed Update UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms:
This UTS is being updated to correspond with Unicode 7.0. Text has been added about the use of NFC, and on the use of Catalan in identifiers. A note has been added on the collection of confusable data outside of Status=allowed, such as for non-NFKC characters.

Review notes solicit feedback on whether to (a) add multi-character sequences to the data file, (b) change some of the Type values, and (c) base the data more on CLDR exemplars, and/or (d) change the format of the data files.

The closing date for both of these issues is April 28, 2014. For information about how to discuss this Public Review Issue and how to supply formal feedback, please see the feedback and discussion instructions on the PRI pages.

The Public Review Issues page is: http://www.unicode.org/review/

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

CLDR Version 25 Released

Unicode CLDR 25 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by a wide spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

Unicode CLDR 25 focused primarily on improvements to the LDML structure and tools, and on consistency of data. There are many smaller data fixes, but there was no general data submission. Changes include the following:
  • New rules for plural ranges (1-2 liters) for 72 locales, plurals for 2 locales, and ordinals for 18 locales.
  • Better locale matching with fallbacks for languages, default languages for continents and subcontinents, and default scripts for more languages.
  • Two new locales: West Frisian (fy) and Uyghur (ug).
  • Two new metazones: Mexico_Pacific and Mexico_Northwest
  • Updated zh pinyin & zhuyin collations and translators for Unicode 6.3 kMandarin data
  • Updated keyboard layout data for OSX, Windows and others.
This version contains data for 238 languages and 259 territories—740 locales in all.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-25, along with a detailed Migration section.