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RE: [idn] RE: An idn protocolfor consideration in making the requirements
- To: idn@ops.ietf.org
- Subject: RE: [idn] RE: An idn protocolfor consideration in making the requirements
- From: Karlsson Kent - keka <keka@im.se>
- Date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 13:47:07 +0100
- Delivery-date: Mon, 14 Feb 2000 04:47:41 -0800
- Envelope-to: idn-data@psg.com
Title: RE: [idn] RE: An idn protocolfor consideration in making the req uirements
For
a fair number of people in the world, ASCII is barely readable, and their
scripts are unreadable many others. An I18N design, while it has to
accommodate to the existing systems in place, should should be script neutral
and not biased in favor of English.
If I
understand your proposal correctly, in essence you propose that
the official name will be ASCII, with synonyms in other scripts. The
non-ASCII names will only be used if the user agent in some way asks for
them.
The
idea is that the *fallback* name would be in ASCII (for SMTP mainly; HTTP
apparently don't need this even now!).
In many cases the *preferred* name(s) would not be in ASCII. If that
happens to (in some way) imply that the "official" name would be in ASCII, does
not worry me, as long as it is only used as a fallback when there is another
(preferred) name or names. I'd rather have a fallback to something barely
readable than having something which is definitely
unreadable.
I
think the problem you raise is not a real problem, it is just a nuisance.
People will not very often be exposed to "gibberish" ASCII names,
The experience with BASE64 for text and QP strongly
indicate otherwise. Even after 10 years not even IETF nor
IMC themselves can handle it properly (see ftp://ops.ietf.org/pub/lists/idn.current [which
is 'in the raw'] and http://www.imc.org/idn/mail-archive/ [where
BASE64 is not decoded in headings and QP looses its charset declaration]).
And the number of bugs, and the time to (partially!) correct them, relating to
QP and BASE64 in e-mail products is not encouraging for that kind of
approach.
they will
have to ask for them in some way or receive mail. People who will be
intentionally using IDNS will necessarily have a suitable user agent. And if
you are exposed to these names in the raw, they are just meaningless, not
causing any other difficulty. If you reply to such mail, it should still
work.
Nobody in the right cautious mind would use them for
reply. They would, however, cause questions to someone that "might know"
on why the h--l the address suddently (and sometimes) turned into crap.
There would be no easy and good answer. And there would be no end to
that.
Jony
Kind
regards
/kent
k