Why do webforms often refuse non-ASCII characters?

[Phil Smith III]

Great reference, thanks! Gotta like NXX and UXX. Bet airline staff get to explain this a LOT to first-time travelers.

 

And thanks also for providing BOTH page numbers. (I hate that aspect of PDFs, though there’s no real way to fix it.)

 

From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> On Behalf Of Henri Sivonen via Unicode
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2025 9:33 AM
To: unicode at corp.unicode.org
Subject: Re: Why do webforms often refuse non-ASCII characters?

 

On Wed, Jan 29, 2025 at 5:58 PM Jens Maurer via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org <mailto:unicode at corp.unicode.org> > wrote:

For the airline industry, names seem to be all-caps ASCII, and
I wouldn't be surprised if there are some IATA or ICAO rules that
require exactly that.

 

See https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p3_cons_en.pdf from PDF page 32 / in-document page number 24 onwards.

 

FWIW, it's worse than what the spec says: Even though the spec allows A for Ä and O for Ö, Finnish passports do the German-style AE and OE even though it doesn't really match the preferences of either Finnish-language or Swedish-language name holders. I imagine that changing what Finland does for passports could be messy as people's ICAO names would change.

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