Masataka Ohta and Vernon Schryver make excellent points in favor of the domain name status quo. I agree that IDN should be frozen for at least a few years to see what local domain admins and application vendors tend to do, especially since the pieces of the likely solutions (such as the competing UTF-8 encodings) are so still so new and somewhat under development. I don't know why ICANN would want to bring such a heavy burden upon themselves in an area of such flux so soone, when they have so much else that they have already committed to do. This thread reminded me of these news items, only two days apart: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/travel/DailyNews/FrenchintheSkies000404.html http://abcnews.go.com/sections/travel/DailyNews/BacktoFrenchinSkies000406.html Cheers, James P.S. By the way, on my usual topic of wireless asynchronous voice messaging, here is a news article in which Qualcomm founder and chief Irwin Jacobs asserts that "voice-enabled capabilities" "could prove popular" on third-generation mobile phones: http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/001206/hkg15073_2.html I suppose Irwin Jacobs is the person to ask for MIME audio attachment record and play in Eudora email on the PalmOS. Please ask in person if you see him in San Diego!
