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

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 8:44 PM +0000 1/7/01, D. J. Bernstein said:
>People who put hard-to-recognize characters onto their business cards
>are going to add a line giving the Unicode numbers, perhaps in boxes:

*Are* going to?! It is incredibly presumptuous of anyone, even Dan 
Bernstein, to say what people all over the world are going to do on 
their business cards.

>
>    postmaster@S.cr.yp.to            (with a contour-integral sign)
>
>               +----+
>    postmaster@|222E|.cr.yp.to       (in smaller type)
>               +----+

That almost works for host names that contain a single non-ASCII 
character. A typical company name in Arabic, for example, might have 
ten non-ASCII characters, and the TLD might contain another five 
(yes, we should be assuming longer TLDs that contain country names 
that use non-ASCII characters!). So, the proposition is that the 
translation from 15 characters in the "real" address will expand to 
60 characters, plus "perhaps boxes" around each set of four 
characters.

This might barely work for Europeans; it is unworkable for the 
majority of the world.

>End of problem.

For your host name; others might have a few more problems than you. 
Maybe the IETF should work a bit harder on a solution that meets the 
needs of more than a tiny audience.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium