Re: [idn] The Business Card problem (was: Re: An experiment with UTF-8 domain names)

["D. J. Bernstein c/o James Seng" <James@Seng.cc>]

Operating systems are all going to support direct input of Unicode
characters by number. The ISO standard method is Shift-Ctrl-222E for
character 222E.

People who put hard-to-recognize characters onto their business cards
are going to add a line giving the Unicode numbers, perhaps in boxes:

   postmaster@S.cr.yp.to            (with a contour-integral sign)

              +----+
   postmaster@|222E|.cr.yp.to       (in smaller type)
              +----+

The second line won't distract the people in the intended audience who
recognize the contour-integral sign and have, say, Alt-S configured to
produce it.

End of problem. Notice that this doesn't require any extra DNS names.
The conversion of Shift-Ctrl-222E to \342\210\256 is isolated inside the
keyboard interface; other software doesn't have to worry about it.

---Dan