In message <[email protected]>, Edward Shryane <[email protected]> wrote:
>Using ISO-8859-1 to encode IDN email addresses in the RIPE database does >cause some issues: We agree on that point, 100%. >- Only a small subset of the UTF-8 character set is supported, >characters outside ISO-8859-1 are substituted with a '?' on Whois >update. Yes. And this is really rather entirely sub-optimal. >- ISO-8859-1 encoded email addresses may not be handled properly by >Whois clients or mail servers. I personally am not too concerned about WHOIS client tools. They can adapt or die. :-) It is certainly the case however that most or all existing WHOIS clients do not contain any UTF-8 decoding logic, and that they thus will display only 7-bit US-ASCII or, in some cases that and alo ISO-8859-1 encoded single byte characters. For all of these existing clients & tools it would be maximally convenient to be able to cut-and-paste email addresses out of the WHOIS data base records, as these tools render them, and directly into mail clients. Either a UTF-8 encoding or a punycode encoding (of domain name) -might- possibly work for that. I personally prefer punycode because it is effectively the lowest common denominator. It does not force WHOIS clients or tools to support anything beyond simple and primitive 7-bit US-ASCII, and yet it can still express 100% of all modern IDNs. Regards, rfg
