Re: [idn] An experiment with UTF-8 domain names

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

On Sat, 6 Jan 2001, J. William Semich wrote:

| >...but could also on my business card have (if the ACE ends up being
| RACE):
| >   bq--abtoi3duon2hf5tn .com
| 
| >Yes, it looks ugly, ...
| 
| Not to mention it would be hard for most people to remember.

  I don't think this is in reality a requirement.  If you decide to put an
IDN on your business card, some people may have problems using it, but I
would suspect rather quickly that most users, particularly non-English
speakers, will become aware that they will need to update their software
to use these names.

  Its sort of like the situation you had a few years ago when URLs and
e-mail addresses started appearing on business cards.  Many people who
received those cards weren't able to use those new identifiers as they
didn't have e-mail or web access.  This I think helped encourage more
rapid adoption of those technologies.  Something similar will probably
happen with IDN.

  Probably a common scenario will be a non-technical person receiving a
business card with an IDN on it.  They'll try to type the name into their
browser, and it will fail to resolve.  They'll contact their IT support
staff, who will tell them what they need to do to use the IDN (and educate
them a little bit on this 'new thing'), they'll update their software as
required, and they'll move on.

  Its not clear to me that you really need to expose ACE in a context like
this.

  -bws