Universal Acceptance (UA) is a term coined by technologist Ram Mohan in 2001 to represent the principle that every
top-level domain
A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
(TLD) should function within all applications regardless of script, number of characters, or how new it is.
Historically, there were a limited number of TLDs available in strings of two or three Latin-script characters. This began to change in 2000, when
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...
introduced new
generic top-level domain
Generic top-level domains (gTLDs) are one of the categories of top-level domains (TLDs) maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for use in the Domain Name System of the Internet. A top-level domain is the last level of eve ...
s (gTLDs) that were longer than three characters, such as
.info
The domain name info is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. The name is derived from ''information'', although registration requirements do not prescribe any particular purpose.
The TLD ''info'' wa ...
and
.museum
museum is a sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) in the Domain Name System of the Internet used exclusively by museums, museum associations, and individual members of the museum profession, as these groups are defined by the International Council ...
. In 2010, the first
internationalised domain name
An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that contains at least one label displayed in Application software, software applications, in whole or in part, in non-latin script or alphabet, such as Arabic, Bengali language, ...
s (IDNs), or domain names using non-Latin characters, were introduced. In 2013, ICANN's New gTLD Program introduced over 1,000 new gTLDs to its root. One issue surrounding the expansion of the Domain Name System’s Root Zone is the ability of Internet-based applications and systems to interact with these domain names. For the principles of Universal Acceptance to be realized, all valid domain names and email addresses must be accepted, validated, stored, processed and displayed correctly and consistently by all Internet-enabled applications, devices and systems.
Universal Acceptance Steering Group founding
In January 2015, Ram Mohan (then part of
Afilias
Afilias, Inc. is a US corporation that is the registry operator of the .info, .mobi and .pro top-level domain, service provider for registry operators of .org, .ngo, .lgbt, .asia, .aero, and a provider of domain name registry services for countri ...
) convened a group of experts along with Cyrus Namazi (ex-
ICANN
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...
) to discuss the proliferation of Universal Acceptance issues after the increase in the number of TLDs in the root. In February 2015, Mohan founded the Universal Acceptance Steering Group (UASG) at the ICANN52 meeting in Singapore. The first face to face meeting of the UASG was held at the ICANN53 meeting in Buenos Aires. The UASG has grown into a community-led program, supported by ICANN, aimed at facilitating the adoption of Universal Acceptance principles by the industry.
Mohan's Laws of Universal Acceptance
In 2002, Ram Mohan, then CTO of the .INFO TLD, experienced the first instances of Universal Acceptance problems, and crafted three laws that appeared valid in the domain name space:
# An old TLD will be accepted more often than a new TLD.
# An ASCII-only TLD will be accepted more than an IDN TLD.
# A two or three letter TLD will be accepted more often than a longer ccTLD or gTLD.
As of 2019, these laws appear to still hold true. The success of Universal Acceptance will result in these laws becoming obsolete.
Universal Acceptance of popular web browsers
One of the primary ways of interfacing with the Internet is through web browsers. For this reason, the UASG commissioned a report on the performance of major browsers in the treatment and acceptance of 17 different domain names registered for the purpose of providing test cases for UA readiness.
The study found that desktop browsers generally performed well, but only
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
performed as expected. Common problems among the other browsers included the failure to properly render the URLs in the tab title bar and failing to treat an ideographic
full stop
The full stop (Commonwealth English), period (North American English), or full point , is a punctuation mark. It is used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence (as distinguished from a question or exclamation ...
as a delimiter. On mobile platforms, the results of the tests were much more varied, with the same browsers performing differently based on the
operating system
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
, with one of the most common problems being the proper display of
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
URLs.
The study concluded that developers are making progress in making browsers UA Ready, but there is more work to do on every browser except Internet Explorer, a browser that has been discontinued.
Email address internalization
Internationalized email address is also part of Universal Acceptance Steering Group, where Email Service providers are motivated to start providing email address for IDNs and also engage them to solve issues related to interoperability with legacy systems. Downgrading is not recommended using punycode however providing ASCII Alias email address with EAI is the recommended practice. Aliasing as downgrading technique is being practiced by BSNL, which used XgenPlus email solution.
Leadership at Universal Acceptance Steering Group
Leaders for UASG are chosen every two years by vote. In February 2015
Ram Mohanwas elected chair, and Edmon Chung, Richard Merdinger and Mark Svancarek were elected vice chairs. In March 2019, Dr.
Ajay Data was elected Chair and Dusan Stojicevic, Mark Svancarek and Dennis Tan Tanaka were elected vice chairs. In 2021 Dr. Ajay Data was again elected unopposed Chair of UASG along with Dr. U.B. Pavanaja and Abdalmonem Galila as vice chairs.
Working groups
In 2019, UASG created working groups
with community leaders and volunteers to better manage the groups works.
* Technology Working Group
* Email Address Internationalization
* Communications
* Measurement
* Local Initiatives
References
{{reflist
Domain Name System
Internationalized domain names