IEA Bottom Line (was: Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA))
Folks, I've just spent several hours reading my way through much of through the long and fascinating thread caused by the BOF announcement. I should probably just remain silent, but the traffic causes me to have a few thoughts. Some of them have been mentioned on the list in one form or another, but let me try to draw them together in the hope of separating them from the noise. As a preface, sound bites are a lot of fun, especially among politicians and demagogues. To the extent that our goal is good design and engineering, we need to do serious analysis and try to read and understand serious analysis. I am appalled at the number of postings on this list that seem to indicate people willing to state positions, very strongly, without having read any of the relevant drafts. Whatever is going on in the problem-statement list and WG, that may be a much more severe threat to the IETF's ability to do good work than anything [else] they have gotten fixated on. First, I am strongly committed to interoperability. Without it, much of what makes the network attractive to many of us disappears. We don't then end up at the 500 one-way channels of pointless entertainment that many of us fear, but every significant step taken away from global interoperability --not just of the bits, but of user-level applications-- costs us some of the properties and potential for an Internet that enables human communications. While me may disagree on many things, including the best way to preserve interoperability, I am convinced that Paul, Adam, and Martin are also committed to that goal. I hope the rest of you are too --I've singled them out only because their names are on documents that represent approaches to the email internationalization problem -- if you aren't, these discussions are pretty pointless. Second, it is clear to me that there is a tradeoff between completely convenient localization and global interoperability. In a completely local environment, I can not only use local characters and character codings, but I don't even need to label them. Identifying the codings in use, or even protocol variants in use, doesn't require international standards -- they are needed only if one wishes to get some (or considerable) localization while preserving some (or, I hope, considerable) global interoperability. Third, while it would certainly make global interoperability easier, there is no way to prevent people from deciding to use local characters, and maybe even local codings, in local environments. They will do it. They will believe (probably correctly) that they have good reasons for doing it. Our choices are between * Finding a rational, plausible, global way to let them do it while still preserving global interoperability or * Not doing that and ending up with a potentially large number of local solutions that won't interoperate or, at best, will require using different protocols for local/ national/ in-language email and for global communication. There is some superficial appeal to the second choice, i.e., to saying the world will communicate using Roman characters; anyone who wants to do something else will need to use local systems among people who share the relevant language and character sets. But it won't work, as anyone who has been through the age of information-losing gateways among Internet mail/ PROFS/ cc:mail/ MSMail/ X.400/ etc., etc., can attest. Bad idea. Doesn't work well and often works very badly. Assume it is going to be an internationalization standard or a significant drop in interoperability. No other choices. Fourth, there was, and is, a case to be made that internationalization of domain names is unnecessary and dumb because, in that view, domain names are protocol elements that need absolutely maximum interoperability and can be hidden from users. Those who advocated that position lost the argument -- probably as soon as the first user saw the first web URL. But there is no such case to be made for email addresses except, possibly, among those who entertain the fantasy that The Directory will take over the Internet. Well, it may be really sad, but that plan has been over for years and years. Hasn't happened and, absent some miracle, isn't going to happen. The argument for why one can't get away without internationalization (or at least localization) of email addresses is in my draft. If you care and haven't done so, go read it. If you are not willing to read that, you probably aren't reading this either. Finally, the difference between the proposal from Paul and Adam and mine hinges on some very fundamental principles about architecture and deployability. One way to oversimplify the difference is that mine is better optimized for fully-internationalized local environments in the short term, and a fully-internationalized world in the
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: So my question remains: are we doing the 3 billion asians a favor by forcing them to be able to tell the difference between e-caron and e-breve? I got some advertising for www.renault-branchenloesungen.de the other day, because I'm part of the target group clearly expressed by that domain name. Is Renault doing the people on this list, or those three billion Asians, a favour by using such an incomprehensible domain name? Not? But I don't think it's a problem either. And I don't think the number of people who need to deal with e-macron, but don't know Lithuanian or Lettish, will be big. It'll be self-regulatingly small. People like you (Valdis), who might expose e-macron to us foreigners, tend to make our lives easier by changing the way you spell your names. Sure, if you were to insist that we (or those three billion) spell your name correctly, you'd cause some pain. But you don't, so that macron of yours isn't a problem for us. (Btw, are those the right languages for e-macron? I'm fuzzy on that.) --Arnt
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Dave Aronson wrote: Think also of many businesses that cater to the general public, from bleeding-edge geeks like us, to those who can barely spell PDA and don't know what one is. I think the only times I've seen anybody use PDAs to exchange contact information were at IETF meetings, in the hallways, when people had time to kill. It just takes too long. Typically, when two companies are meeting, and you've got, say, four people on each side, everybody swaps business cards in under a minute, and you're done. Doing the same thing via IR would hold the meeting up too long. -- /==\ |John Stracke |[EMAIL PROTECTED] | |Principal Engineer|http://www.centive.com | |Centive |My opinions are my own.| |==| |I have strong opinions about ambivalence. | \==/
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu October 30 2003 17:24, Markus Stumpf wrote: - How long will there be paper business cards? Don't a lot people already exchange business cards per handheld/organizer? IMHO, always, even for ones with email addresses (and URLs and so on) on them. Even those who lug PDAs around everywhere, may occasionally have reason to give contact data to someone who doesn't. Think also of many businesses that cater to the general public, from bleeding-edge geeks like us, to those who can barely spell PDA and don't know what one is. Sure, such a business has many clientele who wouldn't make use of the email address, URL, etc. However, that's usually not enough to justify leaving them off. Can we have a show of hands of those people who, when giving or receiving contact data in person, do so *only* by transmitting between PDAs? (If you prefer, feel free to reply directly. I'll announce results and comments received.) I'm guessing that describes far less than a single percent of us, never mind the world. -- Dave Aronson, Senior Software Engineer, Secure Software Inc. (Opinions above NOT those of securesw.com unless so stated!) Email me at: work (D0T) 2004 (@T) dja (D0T) mailme (D0T) org Web: http://destined.to/program http://listen.to/davearonson
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
At 23:24 30/10/03, Markus Stumpf wrote: A big fair in Munich had tested kinda electronic cards lately. As you buy your ticket you type in your contact data and it is printed on the card as a barcode. Exhibitors had barcode readers and special software, so if you want to make a contact you hand over your ticket and the infos flow ... Markus, We are here in a typical layer violation we do not see. We think that passing information from layer 7 to a user is a simple task because ascii simplifies it to ascii readers. ENS Model puts 2 layers for that. Your example is a very good common example of this: - the application layer (7) has an infromation: the visitor carries and delivers his name to the registration system - the interapplication layer (8) corresponds to the trade show system which organizes and manages the bar codes or other systems (magnetic, noise printing, laser, etc.) and the event and the lanes for him to stop at your boot using his feet and not bytes on a wire. - the assistant layer (9) which is going to read the information for you and/or for your computer. - until eventually you the user (layer 10) may access to the infromation and possibly disseminate to other layer 10 colleagues or colleges, or to escalate it to other communicating structures (11). For example the visitor may be a common client for your trade pavillon and benefit from a discount. And then you may want to verify his legal ID and hit the societal system layer (12). All these layers car be executed by people and by machines. The simplest protocol is yes/no. It then increases in complexity through numbers, then langages and characters. Basic English and ASCII are one of the most interesting level for naked brainq. But what about computer (software) or community assisted (brainware) brains: whre is/are the most interesting levels of equilibrium? This is why I say the target is not to develop internationalized, nor multilingual names. To please Hindi vs American (objections stand). But a truly fully vernacular support for users and applications. This means even more than transparent binary, because binary is only to be one occurence in it. We have a default : ascii. We have a first level of complexity : IDNA. This must continue. This is why I objected to the (xn--) structure. It is to be necessarily the begining of an unlimited vernacularisation. Having entered the xn-- in the left of the name label introduced a cross hierarchical structure in the DNS (levels from right to left and layers within the labels from left to right). With a complex impact on the DNS administration and evolution - as we start seeing it now. Another exemple is IPv6. I doubt we can continue writing manually db.flles addresses. Now, several question the need of a change. IMHO they are right and wrong as we do not consider the layers. At the user's layer we must have everything in the language and culture of the user. We are not going to say that cultures are bugs to correct to fit IDNA! But at the old SMTP level or DNS do we need that complexity? I think not. Even if we were building a brand nwe DNS. What Vint suggests is to use ASCII as a 35 or 37 highly readable numbering pad (2 to 9 A to Z and -, or 0 to 9) to give more capacities to support vernacularization on the layer above. Otherwise everything is going to collapse into a too complex system. For example where are you going to introduce the OPES which will read the written chinese in the proper local way? This is the same problem as for the multilingual TLDs. In a flat model we saw it was not possible. I do not see a real problem in a properly set multi-layer model. One layer can go one way and the next layer the other way. Then you know what you wand to do where. jfc There WILL be a lot of problems with internationalized email addresses but IMHO a lot of them will be solvable by sophisticated software. Some of them won't as in print media (and also tv. radio, ...) a domain µ.de(in 8859-1) and µ.de(in 8859-7) looks identical, but isn't as the µ sit on different codes. So the commercials will be fun: visit us in the Internet on www.µ.de in good old 8859-1 coding. And despite all these I think it will be a long time until addresses like [EMAIL PROTECTED] will look familiar (even if this is a (for me) local coding). \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 06:49:13AM -0600, Spencer Dawkins wrote: I agree with Dave in the general case (the goal is to go beyond today's Internet), but am wondering if that also requires us to go beyond today's language capability when we start leaking these addresses between enclaves. I am sensitive to the comments expressed in this thread, that a heckuva lot of people have to learn two sets of glyphs, and I'm not one of them - I just don't see how we do it any other way. In Europe we have a lot of character sets. I use 8859-1, a few kilometers away in Greece they use 8859-7. As with all the math I at least have an idea about the characters. However neither my keyboard nor my X server can currently be used for that out of the box (as it is). IMHO in all that discussion it is important with the case studies to differentiate if the address has to be keyed in by some human or if I would only need more sophisticated software to deal with the problem. I am not too enthusiastic with all that internationalization, but: - In Germany the DENIC has announced they will provide internationalized domain names probably next year. The run on this names is really big. Other NICs surely have similar plans. So with these domain names we need a method to transport email there. - If I want to go to the olypic games in Greece next year and the website has an email address with greek characters, will I be able to click on it type some text, and my MUA/browser will do the right thing? If it will work and everyone will be able to recognize this is the email address that's fine for me. XML for more structure and better browsers will help for the latter some time. - How long will there be paper business cards? Don't a lot people already exchange business cards per handheld/organizer? And those companies with international contacts will have accounts in the according coding or at least in a coding that is familiar for the other party. Software will be able to do the rest. So you will have to carry a small bag of different cards with different codings until you will have no paper cards any longer, because they are too difficult to handle in this area. A big fair in Munich had tested kinda electronic cards lately. As you buy your ticket you type in your contact data and it is printed on the card as a barcode. Exhibitors had barcode readers and special software, so if you want to make a contact you hand over your ticket and the infos flow ... There WILL be a lot of problems with internationalized email addresses but IMHO a lot of them will be solvable by sophisticated software. Some of them won't as in print media (and also tv. radio, ...) a domain µ.de(in 8859-1) and µ.de(in 8859-7) looks identical, but isn't as the µ sit on different codes. So the commercials will be fun: visit us in the Internet on www.µ.de in good old 8859-1 coding. And despite all these I think it will be a long time until addresses like [EMAIL PROTECTED] will look familiar (even if this is a (for me) local coding). \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Are we doing *anybody* favors ... Contrary to super heated claims about unfairness and disenfranchisement, the purposes of this approaching train wreck do not include doing any users any favors. At best it is about proving the maturity of the IETF by inventing a scheme that will make x.400 addresses seem clear and obvious. The first and most important thing about train wrecks is that you don't want to be standing close to where they happen. After waiving your lantern at the people in the engine cabs, it's best run as fast as you can. The second thing is that after the fire, smoke, and noise settles, you will see armies of people and equipment working on enormous piles of debris. The third thing is that although the debris piles and surrounding encampments will look permanent, they will disappear almost overnight and leave almost no sign. In 5 years, everyone except the most laggard acolytes of trade rag gurus will have forgotten it. By then there will be a new runaway internationalization mail address train about to derail. It's not as if we've not been here before. It's past time to start running to get out of the way of this train. Who knows? Maybe this time time the internationalized mail address train won't wreck itself at the bottom of the pass. In other words, do all three of these mailing lists need this traffic? Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:50:06AM -0500, John Stracke wrote: Dave Aronson wrote: Think also of many businesses that cater to the general public, from bleeding-edge geeks like us, to those who can barely spell PDA and don't know what one is. I think the only times I've seen anybody use PDAs to exchange contact information were at IETF meetings, in the hallways, when people had time to kill. It just takes too long. Typically, when two companies are meeting, and you've got, say, four people on each side, everybody swaps business cards in under a minute, and you're done. Doing the same thing via IR would hold the meeting up too long. Agree. Another point is that many firms print contact / support / sales mail addresses on documents. So may also individuals in some circumstances (teachers on the hard copy of their teaching doc, classified advertisements on newspapers, etc.). Though one may conceive adverts with a bluetooth device broadcasting contact information, I believe printed material is still a significant way of obtaining email addresses and will be so for a long. Regarding the actual issue (IEA), the technical problem of having to enter an address in an unknown charset may solve itself almost naturally: people who feel concerned about being reachable by anyone abroad would create/buy/ask-their-admin-for a ascii address, while others would get locale encoded addresses for a local use. A kind of a social consensus. -- Jean-Jacques Puig [homepage] http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~puig/
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 05:11:20PM +0100, Jean-Jacques Puig wrote: Agree. Another point is that many firms print contact / support / sales mail addresses on documents. So may also individuals in some circumstances (teachers on the hard copy of their teaching doc, classified advertisements on newspapers, etc.). But this is an issue only in this are cross contacts to non local partners. Local partners have the same charset coding so this would not be a problem at all. naturally: people who feel concerned about being reachable by anyone abroad would create/buy/ask-their-admin-for a ascii address, while others would get locale encoded addresses for a local use. A kind of a social consensus. And the default ASCII coding may change to a default chinese coding in some years ;-) \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:50:06AM -0500, John Stracke wrote: I think the only times I've seen anybody use PDAs to exchange contact information were at IETF meetings, in the hallways, when people had time to kill. It just takes too long. Typically, when two companies are meeting, and you've got, say, four people on each side, everybody swaps business cards in under a minute, and you're done. Doing the same thing via IR would hold the meeting up too long. Please keep in mind two things 1) I wrote I am not too enthusiastic with all that internationalization ;-)) 2) I used the example with PDAs mainly for international contacts. Maybe our company is to small, but most of the time I have face to face contact to people of foreign companies they are from a local subsidiary and they have a local domain on their cards. So with most of the meetings (for me at least) this would be a non issue. \Maex -- SpaceNet AG| Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 | Fon: +49 (89) 32356-0 Research Development | D-80807 Muenchen| Fax: +49 (89) 32356-299 The security, stability and reliability of a computer system is reciprocally proportional to the amount of vacuity between the ears of the admin
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Valdis, I think your example underscores the difference between localization of an interface to make use of local language/script and globalization that permits interworking among all parties, independent of their local language and script. the confusion between these two (familiar user interfaces vs ability to communicate with everyone) makes for a good deal of debate. I hope can keep in mind both of these desirable aspects but most especially our ability to preserve the global communication needed. The dialing of telephone numbers relies on the ability of every party to enter digits while the system does not care much about what language we speak. One might think of Latin-A as the Internet equivalent of digits - however, I don't know whether it is a valid analogy. vint At 11:44 PM 10/29/2003 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *** PGP SIGNATURE VERIFICATION *** *** Status: Good Signature from Invalid Key *** Alert:Please verify signer's key before trusting signature. *** Signer: Valdis Kletnieks [EMAIL PROTECTED] (0xB4D3D7B0) *** Signed: 10/29/2003 11:44:55 PM *** Verified: 10/30/2003 2:02:59 AM *** BEGIN PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE *** On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 07:32:46 +0800, James Seng said: to your opinion but please do so in other place, and not here. The group is suppose to work on Internationalization of Email address (identifiers), not debate whether we need it or not. Any group that addresses how and for which contexts without having a good grasp on why is inventing solutions in search of problems. Mark actually *does* have a *very* valid point - on today's internet, if you cannot recognize and enter the glyphs for at least c, h, m, o p, t, w, ':', '@', '.', and '/' you are effectively unable to use the internet. It may not make any sense to you, but you can at least recognize and enter them (note that this same issue was one of the biggest arguments against the .biz domain). So.. having established that if they're currently using the internet, they can at least recognize and enter the Latin glyphs, this raises a number of *very* important questions: 1) Is there reason to *not* expect said knowledge of Latin glyphs in the future? If not, what user group(s) will be literate but not know the Latin charset? 2) Is a community approach acceptable? Is usage of Han OK as long as you're interacting with other Han users, or are the issues of leakage too high? 3) What *are* the issues of leakage? What am I expected to see if I get some Han, and how am I to interact with it? Equally important, what does the Han user do with my leaked Latin-A characters? 4) Here's a somewhat related issue - looking at the U0100.pdf from www.unicode,org, I had to enlarge page 2 quite a bit before I could see the difference between the glyphs at 0114/0115 (capital/small e with breve) and 011A/011B (capital/small e with caron). And I know my way around most of the Latin characters - our hypothetical Han user is going to be swinging in the breeze if he gets a business card with e-caron on it. And if you can't safely put e-caron on a business card, why are we bothering? *** END PGP VERIFIED MESSAGE *** Vint Cerf SVP Technology Strategy MCI 22001 Loudoun County Parkway, F2-4115 Ashburn, VA 20147 703 886 1690 (v806 1690) 703 886 0047 fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.mci.com/cerfsup
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Valdis, VKve Mark actually *does* have a *very* valid point - on today's internet, if you 1. The goal is to go beyond today's internet. (But then, that is always the goal of a new standard.) 2. Although the primary focus of IETF work is to make standards for global interoperability, there are fine and valid needs for making global conventions to support local interoperability. Permitting local-part to be unicode is one of those. (And, no, I do not believe this requires changing the global parsing rules.) d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Ummm, I'm not a Genius of E-mail, but I have sent a few. :-} The very-helpful scenario Valdis included a couple of notes back (if we punt on common ability to use Latin glyphs) has happened in my life, at the presentation level - I've been swapping e-mail back and forth with some very talented people in Korea. So, they have ascii-fied e-mail addresses that aren't THAT obvious (I think spencer, or dcrocker, or even vinton.c.cerf, is pretty obvious, but my three kids are daddys_little_hurl (April), buddha20oz(Daniel), and gypsycameo(Amy), so you're not going to figure out who's been copied just by looking at e-mail addresses in the general case), and presentation names that are localized, so I can't read them. If a collaborator copies three people who I can't decode from the e-mail address, and can't read from the presentation name, I can't figure out if another researcher has been copied or not, without asking. If I can't read the characters in the local part of the e-mail address, there's even less chance I'll be able to figure out who's been copied (and usually, figuring out who hasn't been copied is more interesting, in my limited experience) - I know I'm going to regret not reading Korean when I'm at IETF 59, but today, I don't read Korean. Game over.. I agree with Dave in the general case (the goal is to go beyond today's Internet), but am wondering if that also requires us to go beyond today's language capability when we start leaking these addresses between enclaves. I am sensitive to the comments expressed in this thread, that a heckuva lot of people have to learn two sets of glyphs, and I'm not one of them - I just don't see how we do it any other way. Oh, yeah - the other thing was, discussion about leaking out of a Mongolian enclave is interesting, but leaking between two non-Latin enclaves is where the rubber meets the road, and I've worked with too many smart people from Asia/Pacific and from the Middle East to believe that we wouldn't have two non-Latin enclaves who would be collaborating about fifteen minutes after the second enclave starts up... Spencer p.s. Because I'm not a Genius of Internationalization, I apologize for using country names as if they were character sets in advance - hope my comment is still somewhat clear. p.p.s. If we DO discover life on Mars, I'm willing to change my mind. I know my stepson would love ro have an excuse to learn Martian/Klingon/etc
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 09:13:55 PST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: Forget Mongolian. Think Chinese and Hindi, plus related languages that use their character sets. Between the two of them you have nearly 3 billion potential users, i.e. half the world's population. Admittedly not all of them are literate, and many do understand the Latin character set, but this is still a very large group to disenfranchise. Right. The yet unanswered question is how many would be disenfranchised by making them learn the Latin charset, compared to how many would be disenfranchised by a non-perfect globalization scheme (see my comment yesterday regarding macrons and carons). There is a second thread to your argument which I object to. Just because many Internet users can understand the Latin character set does not mean they do not want to send stuff in their native character set, or be forced to use the Latin character set. Of course so far we have made it impossible to do so. Note that this is discussing *addresses only*. We've had charset support for bodyparts and 2047-encoding for other header fields for *years*. I get at least 5 or 6 emails a day that have addresses of the form From: kanji/big5/etc string here [EMAIL PROTECTED] and/or have charset=utf-8 and kanji in them. Why place unnecessary restrictions on the Internet just because it results in messages that you personally can't understand? An equally important consideration is that it result in messages that are *usable* (possibly without comprehension). If whatever scheme we decide on results in messages that I can't hit reply to or otherwise process, it's not doing anybody any favors. An often overlooked aspect of the ASCII charset is that it has 52 glyphs which for the most part are visually distinctive (except for zero/oh, and one/lower-ell), so even a non-speaker can make a determination have I entered the same glyphs as are on the business card?. This is not true for any of the Asian glyph sets (at least *I* can't tell easily), and I don't think that the Latin 1/A/B extension has this property either, once you start dealing with macrons, cedillas, ogonceks, carons, dots, and other ornamentation So my question remains: are we doing the 3 billion asians a favor by forcing them to be able to tell the difference between e-caron and e-breve? Are we doing *anybody* favors if we make them use rfc3490-style xn-- strings that are totally incomprehensible if they are from outside the local conclave? Remember - if they don't understand Latin charsets, a 3490-encoded address will be *painful*, even for the *owner*. You don't believe me? Take the character string 'valdis.kletnieks', change the first e to 0113 (small e-macron), punycode it, and let me know how much mnemonic value it has. And remember - the string you get there is the sort of thing that all 3 billion Asians will get to enter (after I get my sysadmin to set up the aliases to get that punycode to actually drop into *my* mailbox). Are you sure it's worth the effort? It's not that I'm unsympathetic to the goals - far from it. It's just that I was there during the RFC2047 wars (which are *still* going on in the spam world, silly spammers sending around untagged 8-bit headers), and a big part of me wants to say Oh no, not again. pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu October 30 2003 07:49, Spencer Dawkins wrote: leaking between two non-Latin enclaves is where the rubber meets the road, Specifically, two enclaves with *different* non-Latin character sets. (Probably what you meant, but) I've worked with too many smart people from Asia/Pacific and from the Middle East to believe that we wouldn't have two non-Latin enclaves who would be collaborating about fifteen minutes after the second enclave starts up... Exactly. The developinging friendship between Israel and India, two tech powerhouses using radically different non-Latin character sets, should be quite interesting in many ways, including this. For that matter, even within India, there are several (somewhere in the teens, IIRC) languages widely used. Can someone tell us, how many different character sets these languages use? -- Dave Aronson, Senior Software Engineer, Secure Software Inc. Email me at: work (D0T) 2004 (@T) dja (D0T) mailme (D0T) org Web: http://destined.to/program http://listen.to/davearonson
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 07:32:46 +0800, James Seng said: to your opinion but please do so in other place, and not here. The group is suppose to work on Internationalization of Email address (identifiers), not debate whether we need it or not. Any group that addresses how and for which contexts without having a good grasp on why is inventing solutions in search of problems. [snipped] And if you can't safely put e-caron on a business card, why are we bothering? We're bothering because it has occurred to some of us that some folks somewhere in the world may wish to send email only to themselves within an intranet or a large national intranet or wish to launch their own internal e-government or e-education system that involves interpersonal and interdepartmental communications amongst folks that speak the same language which doesn't not happen to be Latin-based. And if they need to send email to outsiders, then they would send in ASCII email address, as routinely as they would flipping between the reverse and obverse of their namecards, one side the local language (including their local IEA address) and the other, the global lingua franca latin. Right now, the Mongolian (or whatever) government cannot launch say their e-Government intranet email system seamlessly with the Internet without much pain in getting everyone up to speed on the latin character set. IEA support will definitely be a boon to such folks.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
At 01:24 30/10/2003 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:33:31 +0800, Tan Tin Wee said: snip If whatever Mongolia was doing was guaranteed to stay in Mongolia, it wouldn't be an issue. However, people inside the enclave *will* want to communicate with outsiders as well - and the instant you allow an e-mail to cross the border, you have to get all these types of issues sorted out. Mark Crispin's point was that currently, knowledge of Latin glyphs *is* assumed, and as far as anybody has evidenced, this hypothetical Mongolian intranet with many non-Latin-aware users is still hypothetical - and with no evidence saying there actually IS one in the works someplace. So Mark quite reasonably pointed out that it may very well make more *engineering* sense to simply train the very small number of users who don't know Latin glyphs than to come up with some very convoluted scheme that annoys everybody else. Hi The above is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Of course you have to have a knowledge of Latin glyphs because the only Internet around is based on it. The millions of people (including Mongolians) who don't know latin glyphs (and may not yet have computers, and may be illiterate) are still the future users, possibly the majority of future users, of the Internet and this effort is to address their future needs. My observation is that we are maybe worrying too much about the characters being represented and how they are used, We should merely define a protocol. In my book that protocol should allow email addresses to carry the widest possible eight-bit ASCII payload. (ie. everything except control characters) so that existing non-unicode special characters can be carried, and can also carry IDN-style unicoded characters. Sure there will be problems, - there will be anyway. However we need to enable local users to communicate in local scripts in the local language. In this regard Europeans and Americans are maybe too steeped in the existing latin/ASCII to address this issue. We should listen carefully to the non-latin world rather than trying to find reasons not to do it. I often get completely incomprehensible emails which originated in non-latin scripts - I just delete them. I know they're not important for me because no author who tries to write to me in Chinese is going to get very far no matter what communication medium he uses. Why? Because I don't speak Chinese. The tail has to be a certain size before it's able to wag the dog. This dog is almost all tail! Regards Steve Dyer
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 15:13:06 GMT, Zefram said: It doesn't start to get tricky until we get into the eastern European languages -- ASCII only intentionally provides western European diacriticals. Macrons and carons and cedillas, oh my... :) Actually, ASCII doesn't intentionally provide any diacriticals. Western European diacriticals are in the Unicode Latin-1 Supplement, and (as you correctly note) some of us of the eastern European persuasion need characters from Latin-A and/or Latin-B to actually do things... Cue the debate about whether the diacritic should go before or after the base letter. So tell me, does the dot on an 'i' go before or after the base letter? (OK, so I'm just touchy because nobody on this side of the big puddle wants to deal with the fact that the 3rd letter of the preferred spelling of my last name is Unicode codepoint 0113 (Latin small e with macron)). pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
I'm curious: why do you think that everyone would be satisfied with Latin characters only, and no non-Latin characters? Mark __ http://www.macchiato.com Yes, I also agree. Especially in India, we have more than 10 Languages ( Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, etc., )
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Sigh. I used "Greek" in an analogy because I was hoping that some of the Latin-only folks out there would at least recognizethe name of oneother script. But how comforable would you really be, if ? Mark__ - Original Message - From: "Stephane Bortzmeyer" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "Mark Davis" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: "Mark Crispin" [EMAIL PROTECTED]; "Keith Moore" [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; "IMAP Extensions WG" [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue, 2003 Oct 28 00:50 Subject: Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA) On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 05:39:32PM -0800, Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote a message of 76 lines which said: We should remember that for a great many people in the world, Latin letters are quite unnatural; it'd be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in all email addresses. It would be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in mathematics :-)
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
I wouldn't have thought so either, but at least some people questioned the need for non-Latin characters, and went so far as to exclude them from a proposed problem statement: ... There is a growing need to use additional characters, specifically Latin characters with diacriticals and non-Latin characters, in email addresses to better serve the needs of the multi-national Internet community... Mark __ http://www.macchiato.com - Original Message - From: Marc Blanchet [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Mark Crispin [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Abhijit Menon-Sen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue, 2003 Oct 28 08:12 Subject: Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA) it appears to me that this thread is not very different from the idn considerations on usage of idn in the world. So what is really new in this discussion? Marc. -- Tuesday, October 28, 2003 07:10:59 -0800 Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote/a ecrit: (I agree that it's currently nearly impossible to use computers if one isn't familiar with the Latin script, of course.) Which probably makes the rest of this discussion academic, unless we're going to undertake solving *that* problem for Microsoft and the various UNIX/Linux vendors... It is currently impossible to use the Internet without knowing the Latin script. However, the goal of most well-designed client software and operating systems is to permit the user to work entirely within their native language, with a fully localized system. This is reaching to India and other countries; Microsoft has introduced fully localized versions of Indic Windows just recently, and Linux vendors are hard at work to produce fully localized versions of their software. Email and Web addresses are the big remaining holdouts for most people. People should not be forced to use a script that they are unfamiliar with, just to use email addresses and sites in their own countries. Even if they are familiar with the Latin script, it is very often a very bad match for their languages, making it very difficult to figure out how native words would be spelled in it. Mark -- Marc Blanchet Hexago tel: +1-418-266-5533x225 -- http://www.freenet6.net: IPv6 connectivity --
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Mark, (Another jibe, citing the fact that utf-8 is, itself, a modification to raw unicode is probably worth repeating, here.) MD When Unicode is expressed as a series of bytes, there are a number of equally MD valid sncoding schemes (aka serializations). UTF-8 is one of those schemes, and MD is no more or less a modification, and no more or less Unicode than any MD other of these schemes. That's right. It is an encoding. Raw Unicode takes more than 8-bits. Lots more. UTF-8 is a method of encoding those raw bits into a non-raw form. So is the ACE approach. My point was that folks tend to talk about UTF-8 as if it were the raw representation, rather than a derivative encoding. In fact, UTF-8 is exactly parallel to the ACE approach. It might be a more efficient encoding, but it is no more native or direct or raw than ACE. d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
John, JC That's only true if you take the position that there are no native/direct/raw JC encodings of Unicode. Oh? You mean that Unicode does not fit directly -- ie, with no special encoding rules -- into 32 bits, or 24 bits, or somesuch. You mean that Unicode does not need special rules to stuff it into 8 bits, and another set of rules to stuff it into 16 bits? Because if the answer is that yes it does -- and the answer _is_ yes it does -- then my point stands. That's the difference between native representation, versus encoding. d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
As for the protocol, I could have sworn that users do not type protocol data units directly, or at least that they haven't for roughly 25 years. (Another jibe, citing the fact that utf-8 is, itself, a modification to raw unicode is probably worth repeating, here.) While it doesn't really have a bearing on the rest of your message, this is a common misperception that I'd like to take a moment to correct. When Unicode is expressed as a series of bytes, there are a number of equally valid sncoding schemes (aka serializations). UTF-8 is one of those schemes, and is no more or less a modification, and no more or less Unicode than any other of these schemes. Different encoding schemes may be better for different domains, but the conversion between any of those schemes is fast and lossless. See http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.0.0/ch02.pdf, Sections 2.4-2.6. (When Unicode started out 15 years ago, the architecture was different; but it has long been structured this way.) Mark __ http://www.macchiato.com
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Dave Crocker scripsit: That's right. It is an encoding. Raw Unicode takes more than 8-bits. Lots more. UTF-8 is a method of encoding those raw bits into a non-raw form. [snip] It might be a more efficient encoding, but it is no more native or direct or raw than ACE. That's only true if you take the position that there are no native/direct/raw encodings of Unicode. -- In politics, obedience and support John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] are the same thing. --Hannah Arendthttp://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Dave Crocker scripsit: Oh? You mean that Unicode does not fit directly -- ie, with no special encoding rules -- into 32 bits, or 24 bits, or somesuch. Nope. The Unicode character set maps characters to integers. How the integers are mapped to bytes is defined by the encoding rules, of which there are seven standard ones: UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-32, UTF-32BE, UTF-32LE. All have equal status. That's the difference between native representation, versus encoding. There is no native representation in the sense you mean. All representations are equal. -- De plichten van een docent zijn divers, John Cowan die van het gehoor ook. [EMAIL PROTECTED] --Edsger Dijkstra http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On 10:31 28/10/03, Zefram said: I think the first task in this area should be to investigate the nature and degree of desire for non-ASCII local parts. This desire needs to be weighed against the benefits we derive from writing all local parts in a small, fixed alphabet (ASCII printables). May I ask which part of the world you come from? This being said only Americans want/are satisfied with internationalized (sic) names (the artificial extension of the American character set with most of the American foreign scripting, within an ascii frame). No one really wants multilingual names (a totally internationalized (sic) frame supporting languages and therefore some language oriented rules - at least ni management and user support). The users need vernacular support, that is to be able to freely do in the mail what they use to do elsewhere. I note that for non-American writers international names means names that everyone from every nation will understand. It happens to be the ascii character set limited to the DNS used names (they were selected for that reason). jfc
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Crispin, You need to get out of US (or Wsshington) more often. -James Seng I am not convinced that it is possible to use a computer on the Internet anywhere in the world without at least a basic acquaintance with Latin script. I do not believe many individuals (other than primary school children) are literate in their native language but are completely illiterate in Latin script. This does not mean being able to read or write the English language; rather, this simply means knowing the Latin script alphabet. Put another way, individuals who are completely illiterate in Latin script are also likely to be illiterate in their native language script as well. No other script on the planet has such international recognition. There is undoubtably a *preference* for one's native script; and that preference should be respected as much as possible. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
I do not believe that this is true for Chinese. AFAIK, Chinese primary school kids use Latin script with hanyu-pinyin as a stopgap prior to their mastery of Han script (which takes many years). Nope. Hanyu Pinyin was designed to replace the Han ideograph but it never did. Note that when I say recognize Latin script, I mean the ability to determine that dog is a three-letter word that has the letters d, o, and g, each of which the individual recognizes and can name. This does not include the ability to recognize that this refers to a domesticated canine. Based on your reasonings, I think we should all reverted back to numbers, because that is the only universal recongizable set of symbols we have. We have this argument in IDN before and we certainly dont need this again. If you feel we should all stick to Latin, yes, you are entitled to your opinion but please do so in other place, and not here. The group is suppose to work on Internationalization of Email address (identifiers), not debate whether we need it or not. -James Seng
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 07:32:46 +0800, James Seng said: to your opinion but please do so in other place, and not here. The group is suppose to work on Internationalization of Email address (identifiers), not debate whether we need it or not. Any group that addresses how and for which contexts without having a good grasp on why is inventing solutions in search of problems. Mark actually *does* have a *very* valid point - on today's internet, if you cannot recognize and enter the glyphs for at least c, h, m, o p, t, w, ':', '@', '.', and '/' you are effectively unable to use the internet. It may not make any sense to you, but you can at least recognize and enter them (note that this same issue was one of the biggest arguments against the .biz domain). So.. having established that if they're currently using the internet, they can at least recognize and enter the Latin glyphs, this raises a number of *very* important questions: 1) Is there reason to *not* expect said knowledge of Latin glyphs in the future? If not, what user group(s) will be literate but not know the Latin charset? 2) Is a community approach acceptable? Is usage of Han OK as long as you're interacting with other Han users, or are the issues of leakage too high? 3) What *are* the issues of leakage? What am I expected to see if I get some Han, and how am I to interact with it? Equally important, what does the Han user do with my leaked Latin-A characters? 4) Here's a somewhat related issue - looking at the U0100.pdf from www.unicode,org, I had to enlarge page 2 quite a bit before I could see the difference between the glyphs at 0114/0115 (capital/small e with breve) and 011A/011B (capital/small e with caron). And I know my way around most of the Latin characters - our hypothetical Han user is going to be swinging in the breeze if he gets a business card with e-caron on it. And if you can't safely put e-caron on a business card, why are we bothering? pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:33:31 +0800, Tan Tin Wee said: And if they need to send email to outsiders, then they would send in ASCII email address, as routinely as they would OK.. I get that part. Now for the big question: You're there in this Mongolian intranet, and find you need to ask me a technical question, so my address gets entered in ascii. OK so far. You now decide you need to cc: somebody on the intranet so they know I've been asked. 1) What does that person do with my ascii-fied address? 2) How do I do a 'reply all' to both of you? 3) How is your From: address encoded so it's usable *BOTH* from where I am and from where your co-worker is? 3a) Can you achieve goal (3) while using the same From: as you would use if you were mailing ONLY to the intranet (so people don't have to maintain 2 differently encoded values for your address for filtering purposes, etc). If whatever Mongolia was doing was guaranteed to stay in Mongolia, it wouldn't be an issue. However, people inside the enclave *will* want to communicate with outsiders as well - and the instant you allow an e-mail to cross the border, you have to get all these types of issues sorted out. Mark Crispin's point was that currently, knowledge of Latin glyphs *is* assumed, and as far as anybody has evidenced, this hypothetical Mongolian intranet with many non-Latin-aware users is still hypothetical - and with no evidence saying there actually IS one in the works someplace. So Mark quite reasonably pointed out that it may very well make more *engineering* sense to simply train the very small number of users who don't know Latin glyphs than to come up with some very convoluted scheme that annoys everybody else. The tail has to be a certain size before it's able to wag the dog. pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Folks, On the theory that discussions go better when they have a concrete deliverable, here is a proposed charter for a proposed working group. The following started with Mark Crispin's text, although it might not look it. Besides the usual goals for a charter, the following text attempts to specify the problem domain in the narrowest feasible form that is valid. If anyone thinks the scope is too narrow, they need to explain why. DRAFT CHARTER Mail Internationalised Local-Part (MILP) - The local-part portion of RFC2822 and Local-part portion of RFC2821 mail addresses are restricted to a subset of ASCII. This poses a fundamental barrier for users needing mail addresses to be expressed in a richer set of characters, such as Latin characters with diacriticals and the many Asian characters. The goal of the current work is to add local-part support for these additional characters, while preserving the large, installed base of ASCII usage. The group will take: draft-hoffman-imaa-03.txt draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n-01.txt draft-duerst-iri-04.txt as input to discussions. The group will pay particular attention to barriers to adoption and utility, as well as any impact the new scheme might have on the existing base of Internet mail usage. Milestones -- Nov, 03: BOF Dec, 03: WG chartered Feb, 03: Initial draft of working group specifications. Jun, 03: Specifications submitted for IETF approval d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
- good start! - timeline seems pretty agressive... will see. - would probably good to have a requirement document upfront. Might not the same way that idn requirement ends up, but a narrow-implementable requirement would help to have a concensus (hopefully) on what needs to be done. - while the idn req went not that good, now that we have experience, I think we should try to be better and have one. I know I might start some debate with this, but still think it is the best way to go... - would be useful to have some reference to idn (idna) in the charter, as background work. the developers and users will have to take care of both (ie. idn and imail) in the email infrastructure. Marc. -- Monday, October 27, 2003 16:19:25 -0800 Dave Crocker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote/a ecrit: Folks, On the theory that discussions go better when they have a concrete deliverable, here is a proposed charter for a proposed working group. The following started with Mark Crispin's text, although it might not look it. Besides the usual goals for a charter, the following text attempts to specify the problem domain in the narrowest feasible form that is valid. If anyone thinks the scope is too narrow, they need to explain why. DRAFT CHARTER Mail Internationalised Local-Part (MILP) - The local-part portion of RFC2822 and Local-part portion of RFC2821 mail addresses are restricted to a subset of ASCII. This poses a fundamental barrier for users needing mail addresses to be expressed in a richer set of characters, such as Latin characters with diacriticals and the many Asian characters. The goal of the current work is to add local-part support for these additional characters, while preserving the large, installed base of ASCII usage. The group will take: draft-hoffman-imaa-03.txt draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n-01.txt draft-duerst-iri-04.txt as input to discussions. The group will pay particular attention to barriers to adoption and utility, as well as any impact the new scheme might have on the existing base of Internet mail usage. Milestones -- Nov, 03: BOF Dec, 03: WG chartered Feb, 03: Initial draft of working group specifications. Jun, 03: Specifications submitted for IETF approval d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253 -- Marc Blanchet Hexago tel: +1-418-266-5533x225 -- http://www.freenet6.net: IPv6 connectivity --
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Roy, Mail Internationalised Local-Part (MILP) RB Even though, given IDNA now exists as a proposed standard, the main RB issues relate to the local part, the issue under discussion is that of RB internationalized mail addresses, not just internationalized RB local-parts. Really? What work needs to be done, except for local part? IDNA takes care of the right-hand side. So what is there to do about internationalized mail addresses other than the local part? RB Restricting the disucssion to local-parts runs the risk of excluding RB other potentially relevent issues. For instance, one of the issues RB that has been discussed on the IMAA list is whether full-width at RB should be recognized in an internationalized mail address. full-width _where_? somewhere other than local part? if yes, then how can that be practical? if no, then the charter does not preclude their use. (if you think otherwise, please explain.) d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On 10/27/03 at 6:42 PM -0800, Dave Crocker wrote: RB Even though, given IDNA now exists as a proposed standard, the main RB issues relate to the local part, the issue under discussion is that of RB internationalized mail addresses, not just internationalized RB local-parts. Really? What work needs to be done, except for local part? IDNA takes care of the right-hand side. Please review John Klensin's draft before making these kinds of assumptions. RB Restricting the disucssion to local-parts runs the risk of excluding RB other potentially relevent issues. I agree. Limiting discussion at this point to local-part does not take into account some of the possibilities. pr -- Pete Resnick http://.qualcomm.com/~presnick/ QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 05:39:32PM -0800, Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote a message of 76 lines which said: We should remember that for a great many people in the world, Latin letters are quite unnatural; it'd be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in all email addresses. It would be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in mathematics :-)
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Dave Crocker wrote: This poses a fundamental barrier for users needing mail addresses to be expressed in a richer set of characters, I have yet to see this need established. Everyone who has supported internationalised mail addresses has axiomatically assumed such a need, and has conspicuously failed to provide any more detail, such as any of Keith Moore's suggestions. I think the first task in this area should be to investigate the nature and degree of desire for non-ASCII local parts. This desire needs to be weighed against the benefits we derive from writing all local parts in a small, fixed alphabet (ASCII printables). -zefram
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Pete, RB Restricting the disucssion to local-parts runs the risk of excluding RB other potentially relevent issues. PR I agree. Limiting discussion at this point to local-part does not PR take into account some of the possibilities. That was exactly the intent of the text. We have already seen how nicely the text served to bring into pretty stark relief one bit of expectation from one of the proposals. It is only fitting to have it serve the same purpose for another one. IETF BOF time is pretty lousy for an open-ended chat. Having specifications to chat about is only marginally better than not having them. What makes the real difference is having serious focus to the meeting. If we go into this meeting without even having a clear sense of the scope of the problem to be tackled, then the chance of having a productive meeting is pretty small. At the moment, it appears that the focus of the meeting is likely to be: Shall we break existing Internet mail or shall we lay an enhancement on top of it that preserves the installed base. (I'm sure that everyone else who was present at the pre-MIME/ESMTP discussions is really looking forward to repeating the experience.) d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Mail Internationalised Local-Part (MILP) Even though, given IDNA now exists as a proposed standard, the main issues relate to the local part, the issue under discussion is that of internationalized mail addresses, not just internationalized local-parts. Restricting the disucssion to local-parts runs the risk of excluding other potentially relevent issues. For instance, one of the issues that has been discussed on the IMAA list is whether full-width at should be recognized in an internationalized mail address. IMHO, the charter shouldn't be framed in a way that is sufficiently narrow as to render such questions out of scope. -roy
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Keith Moore wrote: Thanks for taking a stab at a problem statement. I'd like to drill down on this just a bit. What is the source of the growing need? Is it: [snip] I agree that this needs to be stated, but someone other than me will have to do it. I believe that the primary push for this functionality comes from regions which use Latin alphabetics with diacriticals; and that most individuals in regions which do not use Latin script are accept the use of Latin script for multinational interchange. In many regions where Latin diacriticals are used, there is no acceptable transform of a surname to a form that does not use diacriticals. Simply omitting the diacritical causes (at least to the inhabitants of those regions) a misspelling. This set of beliefs naturally biases how I approach the problem. The problem statement must be free of bias, including mine. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
I'm curious: why do you think that everyone would be satisfied with Latin characters only, and no non-Latin characters? Mark __ http://www.macchiato.com - Original Message - From: Mark Crispin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Mon, 2003 Oct 27 11:10 Subject: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA) On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Keith Moore wrote: Thanks for taking a stab at a problem statement. I'd like to drill down on this just a bit. What is the source of the growing need? Is it: [snip] I agree that this needs to be stated, but someone other than me will have to do it. I believe that the primary push for this functionality comes from regions which use Latin alphabetics with diacriticals; and that most individuals in regions which do not use Latin script are accept the use of Latin script for multinational interchange. In many regions where Latin diacriticals are used, there is no acceptable transform of a surname to a form that does not use diacriticals. Simply omitting the diacritical causes (at least to the inhabitants of those regions) a misspelling. This set of beliefs naturally biases how I approach the problem. The problem statement must be free of bias, including mine. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Ok, I understand more about the context. Based on what I've seen, I think it quite likely that people will want email addresses in their native script, even if that means that outsiders can't (easily) use those email address. After all, it is quite easy to have multiple email addresses. Mr. Tanaka can have one with Latin letters and one with Japanese (e.g. [EMAIL PROTECTED]). We should remember that for a great many people in the world, Latin letters are quite unnatural; it'd be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in all email addresses. And there are many projects underway in less-developed countries to bring computers to masses of people that will even less familiarity with Latin letters. Mark __ http://www.macchiato.com - Original Message - From: Mark Crispin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; IMAP Extensions WG [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Mon, 2003 Oct 27 17:15 Subject: Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA) On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Mark Davis wrote: I'm curious: why do you think that everyone would be satisfied with Latin characters only, and no non-Latin characters? I didn't say that. I stated my belief that, for reasons of practicality, most individuals in regions which do not use Latin script accept the use of Latin script for multinational exchange. It does not work well for an individual in Japan with surname Tanaka to expect the overwhelming majority of non-Japanese individuals worldwide to know his surname is written with the Han characters for rice paddy and middle, or what those characters look like, or how to enter those characters on the computer. It does, however, work for him to expect that the overwhelming majority of individuals worldwide to know how to deal with the 6 Latin letters that form the romanization Tanaka. Nor is it very likely that this situation will change in the future. I doubt that many individuals in the world are literate in all the world's active scripts. Literacy in one's native script and basic Latin script is something that most computer users possess today. For domestic exchange only, that pair of Han characters are probably alright. Within Western Europe, it's probably alright to use Latin characters with diacriticals. Perhaps the main problem that needs to be decided in any IEA effort is if it is alright to have email addresses that are only usable in limited areas of the world; or if not, how to represent internationalized email addresses in a usable fashion when (not if) the email address needs to be represented for a person and/or computer is illiterate in that script. A likely side issue is whether it is good enough to promote Latin characters with diacriticals to the same status of everybody must know how to do these that is required for ASCII. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Mark Davis wrote: I'm curious: why do you think that everyone would be satisfied with Latin characters only, and no non-Latin characters? I didn't say that. I stated my belief that, for reasons of practicality, most individuals in regions which do not use Latin script accept the use of Latin script for multinational exchange. It does not work well for an individual in Japan with surname Tanaka to expect the overwhelming majority of non-Japanese individuals worldwide to know his surname is written with the Han characters for rice paddy and middle, or what those characters look like, or how to enter those characters on the computer. It does, however, work for him to expect that the overwhelming majority of individuals worldwide to know how to deal with the 6 Latin letters that form the romanization Tanaka. Nor is it very likely that this situation will change in the future. I doubt that many individuals in the world are literate in all the world's active scripts. Literacy in one's native script and basic Latin script is something that most computer users possess today. For domestic exchange only, that pair of Han characters are probably alright. Within Western Europe, it's probably alright to use Latin characters with diacriticals. Perhaps the main problem that needs to be decided in any IEA effort is if it is alright to have email addresses that are only usable in limited areas of the world; or if not, how to represent internationalized email addresses in a usable fashion when (not if) the email address needs to be represented for a person and/or computer is illiterate in that script. A likely side issue is whether it is good enough to promote Latin characters with diacriticals to the same status of everybody must know how to do these that is required for ASCII. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Mark Davis wrote: Based on what I've seen, I think it quite likely that people will want email addresses in their native script, even if that means that outsiders can't (easily) use those email address. That may well be the case. We should remember that for a great many people in the world, Latin letters are quite unnatural; it'd be a bit like if we had to use Greek letters in all email addresses. And there are many projects underway in less-developed countries to bring computers to masses of people that will even less familiarity with Latin letters. I am not convinced that it is possible to use a computer on the Internet anywhere in the world without at least a basic acquaintance with Latin script. I do not believe many individuals (other than primary school children) are literate in their native language but are completely illiterate in Latin script. This does not mean being able to read or write the English language; rather, this simply means knowing the Latin script alphabet. Put another way, individuals who are completely illiterate in Latin script are also likely to be illiterate in their native language script as well. No other script on the planet has such international recognition. There is undoubtably a *preference* for one's native script; and that preference should be respected as much as possible. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
At 2003-10-27 19:37:37 -0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I do not believe many individuals (other than primary school children) are literate in their native language but are completely illiterate in Latin script. This does not mean being able to read or write the English language; rather, this simply means knowing the Latin script alphabet. Mark, The number of people in India who can read and write only their native language, but have no usable knowledge of Latin script, is much larger than the tiny number who are familiar with both. I'm told that this is true for many native speakers of Chinese and Arabic as well. The use of local scripts is much more than just a preference for the numerous localisation efforts in India which focus on making computing more accessible to poor farmers and people in villages. (I agree that it's currently nearly impossible to use computers if one isn't familiar with the Latin script, of course.) -- ams
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Mark Crispin writes: On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: (I agree that it's currently nearly impossible to use computers if one isn't familiar with the Latin script, of course.) Which probably makes the rest of this discussion academic, unless we're going to undertake solving *that* problem for Microsoft and the various UNIX/Linux vendors... You're not appreciating the full complexity of the problem. ;) Not only should the email standards permit MUAs and MTAs of the year 2020 to solve the problem Abhijit mentions, but they should even permit such future programs to interoperate with latinate ones of the present and near future. And if it's too hard for latinate MUAs to implement the IEA standard, that won't happen. --Arnt
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote: The number of people in India who can read and write only their native language, but have no usable knowledge of Latin script, is much larger than the tiny number who are familiar with both. I'm told that this is true for many native speakers of Chinese and Arabic as well. I defer to your superior knowledge about India. I do not believe that this is true for Chinese. AFAIK, Chinese primary school kids use Latin script with hanyu-pinyin as a stopgap prior to their mastery of Han script (which takes many years). The use of local scripts is much more than just a preference for the numerous localisation efforts in India which focus on making computing more accessible to poor farmers and people in villages. A poor farmer or villager in China is more likely to be totally illiterate than to be literate in Han script but unable to recognize Latin script. Note that when I say recognize Latin script, I mean the ability to determine that dog is a three-letter word that has the letters d, o, and g, each of which the individual recognizes and can name. This does not include the ability to recognize that this refers to a domesticated canine. (I agree that it's currently nearly impossible to use computers if one isn't familiar with the Latin script, of course.) Which probably makes the rest of this discussion academic, unless we're going to undertake solving *that* problem for Microsoft and the various UNIX/Linux vendors... -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Mark Crispin wrote: In many regions where Latin diacriticals are used, there is no acceptable transform of a surname to a form that does not use diacriticals. Simply omitting the diacritical causes (at least to the inhabitants of those regions) a misspelling. Ah, this one's easy. Local parts aren't limited to Latin letters, they can use all the ASCII printables. Diacriticals are available there, albeit in characters that are shared with other uses. [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a perfectly valid email address already. It doesn't start to get tricky until we get into the eastern European languages -- ASCII only intentionally provides western European diacriticals. Cue the debate about whether the diacritic should go before or after the base letter. -zefram
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
it appears to me that this thread is not very different from the idn considerations on usage of idn in the world. So what is really new in this discussion? Marc. -- Tuesday, October 28, 2003 07:10:59 -0800 Mark Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote/a ecrit: (I agree that it's currently nearly impossible to use computers if one isn't familiar with the Latin script, of course.) Which probably makes the rest of this discussion academic, unless we're going to undertake solving *that* problem for Microsoft and the various UNIX/Linux vendors... It is currently impossible to use the Internet without knowing the Latin script. However, the goal of most well-designed client software and operating systems is to permit the user to work entirely within their native language, with a fully localized system. This is reaching to India and other countries; Microsoft has introduced fully localized versions of Indic Windows just recently, and Linux vendors are hard at work to produce fully localized versions of their software. Email and Web addresses are the big remaining holdouts for most people. People should not be forced to use a script that they are unfamiliar with, just to use email addresses and sites in their own countries. Even if they are familiar with the Latin script, it is very often a very bad match for their languages, making it very difficult to figure out how native words would be spelled in it. Mark -- Marc Blanchet Hexago tel: +1-418-266-5533x225 -- http://www.freenet6.net: IPv6 connectivity --
RE: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Excuse me, but could you please constrain this conversation to fewer than 9 (nine!) e-mail lists? The BOF description lists [EMAIL PROTECTED] as the discussion list, but this discussion is being cc:ed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'd suggest that you move this discussion to whichever of those lists is actually correct. Margaret
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
--On Tuesday, October 28, 2003 11:12 -0500 Marc Blanchet [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: it appears to me that this thread is not very different from the idn considerations on usage of idn in the world. So what is really new in this discussion? See the draft. Quick answer: DNS interfaces really exist at the protocol level, and a large part of the hypothesis behind IDNA was that it would be possible, after we had enough implementations, to prevent an end-user from ever seeing an encoded domain name. That story just doesn't hold for a special encoding-based (aka MUA-only) email local part implementation, and maybe not for email generally. For example, under current rules, an MTA is required to stuff the name it actually sees in HELO/EHLO and the MAIL command into various headers. If it is expected to notice that they have special encodings and decodes them, we've gone rather far into the infrastructure is involved, even if the actual on-the-wire transport is not impacted. If it doesn't do that, the encodings --both the IDNA domain parts and the special mail encoding-- are going to be in the user's face, in the most literal sense of that term. The similarity of that situation to the early IDN discussions is the importance of the what problem are you solving question. And it is very clear to me that, for email addresses, the answer has got to user sees their own characters in their email addresses and the email addresses of those whose languages they speak/ recognize. Users typically don't actually see envelopes. But seeing, e.g., different forms/codings of an address in the header From: field than appears in Return-path: or than appears in a signature line in the message body, is going to create real unhappiness. Similarly as has been pointed out in another context, seeing an address in different from when it appears in a header than when it (and that header) are encapsulated in a message/?? body part is just not going to amuse any user to whom we've said ok, now you have i18n strings, enjoy your new found local language capabilities. And I guess that tells you what I think the problem is that we need to solve. YMMD. john
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 17:39:32 PST, Mark Davis said: email addresses. Mr. Tanaka can have one with Latin letters and one with Japanese (e.g. [EMAIL PROTECTED]). This gets interesting in the context of a reply all. Apologies for breaking the UTF-8 in the quote, but it's illustrative - if the breakage had been in the To/Cc lines, things would have broken even worse unless whatever scheme we end up using is ASCII-transparent. pgp0.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [idn] Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
John, JCK If one is going to consider internationalization of email JCK addresses in a way that permits them to move through the mail JCK protocol in some traditional Unicode encoding (e.g., UTF-8), JCK then ...then we get to repeat the mime/esmtp debates all over again. After all, why should we even try to learn anything from 10 years of experience. (And no, John, I'm not directing my comment at you.) To be specific: I am not suggesting that pure utf-8 is a bad goal -- although the fact that utf-8 is, itself, a condensed representation of unicode should strike folks as a just a tad ironic, with respect to these discussions. Rather, I suggest that it be a _separate_ goal from near-term support of an edge-only enhancement for Unicode support, the same as we did for mime and IDN. We already have that support for domain names. That only leaves local-part. It's fine to pursue a separate path for long-term 8-bit purity. I'm sure we will achieve it much sooner for addresses than we have for content. JCK Again, the goal is that this should be natural for the user, JCK using the user's script (or the script of the recipient), both JCK in protocol transactions and in the case of My email address is JCK [EMAIL PROTECTED] The business card representation of an email address is the classic example of IETF work that very much _does_ directly involve the user interface. However we already dealt with this issue for non-ascii domain names. We do not need to rehash this issue yet again. As for the protocol, I could have sworn that users do not type protocol data units directly, or at least that they haven't for roughly 25 years. (Another jibe, citing the fact that utf-8 is, itself, a modification to raw unicode is probably worth repeating, here.) JCK in the body of a message... where the only parts of that JCK sentence (appropriately translated) which are a ASCII characters JCK are the @-sign and _maybe_ the TLD (whether the TLD can be JCK non-ASCII is presumably an ICANN problem unless the user JCK interface does something akin to draft-klensin-idn-tld-01.txt). Indeed, representation of non-ascii addressing information within a text segment is an interesting problem. I'd guess it's identical to the business card requirement. And the current issue is no different than we have for IDN. So perhaps the right thing to do is forget about IDN. Pretend it never happen. Let's start all over. Or, perhaps we could complete the design approach started by IDN, while _separately_ pursuing the purist approach of end-to-end 8-bit. JCK So please don't prejudge the question of what happens to the JCK domain part (right hand side) of an email address in the JCK charter: this set of issues should at lease be considered very JCK carefully. Indeed it should, including tidbits like adoption barriers, and the last several years of IDN work. d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Location of the IMAA list (was: RE: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA))
At 11:54 AM -0500 10/28/03, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The BOF description lists [EMAIL PROTECTED] as the discussion list, but this discussion is being cc:ed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I'd suggest that you move this discussion to whichever of those lists is actually correct. It is [EMAIL PROTECTED], although because Patrik sent out the wrong address, I have made sure that both addresses work. An archive of the list, and links to the current versions of the drafts, can be found at http://www.imc.org/ietf-imaa/. No more messages to all lists: that's what the IMAA list is for. --Paul Hoffman, Director --Internet Mail Consortium
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Patrik, Thanks for putting this BOF together. PF Where should the IETF tackle it? I am not sure I understand this question. Please clarify. PFWhat are the next steps for the IETF? Would it help to have a draft charter for the meeting? (I realize that the presence of such different specifications makes a charter at least a bit challenging, but it seems to help to have a draft, to make things concrete.) d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
PFWhat are the next steps for the IETF? Would it help to have a draft charter for the meeting? let's back up a step further. what problem are we trying to solve here? Keith
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On 10/27/03 at 10:52 AM -0500, Keith Moore wrote: DC: Would it help to have a draft charter for the meeting? As was mentioned in the draft agenda at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/03nov/iea.txt, we want to simply start the discussion, not immediately attempt to charter a working group. let's back up a step further. what problem are we trying to solve here? Please have a look at draft-hoffman-imaa, draft-klensin-emailaddr-i18n, and draft-duerst-iri. Certainly the first two have very explicit descriptions of the problem. pr -- Pete Resnick http://.qualcomm.com/~presnick/ QUALCOMM Incorporated - Direct phone: (858)651-4478, Fax: (858)651-1102
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
-- Monday, October 27, 2003 10:52:22 -0500 Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote/a ecrit: PFWhat are the next steps for the IETF? Would it help to have a draft charter for the meeting? let's back up a step further. what problem are we trying to solve here? to me, that (problem we are trying to solve) would be part of the introduction in the charter... so I guess some initial proposal for: - what are we trying to solve - what would be the way to solve it would be a good starting point together with the state-of-the-art presentations. Marc. Keith -- Marc Blanchet Hexago tel: +1-418-266-5533x225 -- http://www.freenet6.net: IPv6 connectivity --
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
Mark, Thanks for taking a stab at a problem statement. I'd like to drill down on this just a bit. What is the source of the growing need? Is it: a. for users of many languages (particularly those not using Latin alphabets) email addresses are difficult to remember b. for users of many languages (particularly those not using Latin alphabets) email addresses are difficult to transcribe or type c. users want to use their names in email addresses d. users are confused by apparently arbitrary restrictions on use of characters in email addresses, and this leads to mistakes e. on computer systems employing non-ASCII names for other purposes (e.g. login or account names) these do not map well to ASCII email addresses or something else that I don't see? As presently constituted, email addresses are limited to the 26 Latin alphabetics, 10 digits, and a limited number of special characters in the ASCII character set. There is a growing need to use additional characters, specifically Latin characters with diacriticals and non-Latin characters, in email addresses to better serve the needs of the multi-national Internet community. However, the restrictions of ASCII email addresses have served as a lingua franca since everybody can enter ASCII email addresses, and there is an ongoing need for this as well. The problem to be solved is the resolution of these two needs.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Keith Moore wrote: what problem are we trying to solve here? I agree with Keith. This isn't to say that I dispute that there is a problem to be solved -- indeed, I think that the problem is apparent to all -- but we must have a problem statement that we all agree upon before we even think about solutions. I don't think that references to drafts of proposed solutions suffice as a problem statement. Leaving aside questions of possible bias (= present a problem in such a way that this is the obvious best solution), having the problem statement in a draft (which by its nature is an ephemeral document) muddies the issues. The problem statement should consist of a single paragraph (and preferably in one or two sentences), separate from any proposed solution, and stated in a charter which is approved by everyone. Here's a start at such a statement: As presently constituted, email addresses are limited to the 26 Latin alphabetics, 10 digits, and a limited number of special characters in the ASCII character set. There is a growing need to use additional characters, specifically Latin characters with diacriticals and non-Latin characters, in email addresses to better serve the needs of the multi-national Internet community. However, the restrictions of ASCII email addresses have served as a lingua franca since everybody can enter ASCII email addresses, and there is an ongoing need for this as well. The problem to be solved is the resolution of these two needs. -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
mc As presently constituted, email addresses are limited to the 26 mc Latin alphabetics, 10 digits, and a limited number of special mc characters in the ASCII character set. There is a growing need to upper and lower case alphabetics -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (WJCarpenter)PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 2573 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
On Mon October 27 2003 12:30, WJCarpenter wrote: mc As presently constituted, email addresses are limited to the 26 mc Latin alphabetics, 10 digits, and a limited number of special mc characters in the ASCII character set. There is a growing need to upper and lower case alphabetics Yes, but with either of those two sets (generally) considered equivalent to the other, boiling down to effectively 26 choices. -- Dave Aronson, Senior Software Engineer, Secure Software Inc. Email me at: work (D0T) 2004 (@T) dja (D0T) mailme (D0T) org Web: http://destined.to/program http://listen.to/davearonson
