Re: [idn] Debunking the ACE myth

[Patrik Fältström <paf@cisco.com>]

--On 01-07-19 11.57 -0500 "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote:

> 1) We have the owners and operators of IDNS. They will want to
>    upgrade their servers to get the full benefits of an UTF-8
>    IDN approach. The only operators who are not likely to
>    upgrade immediately are speculators; they won't be getting
>    much traffic anyway.

Eric, it is sad to use the same arguments on your mail as you are using on
mine.

As evidence that you are completely wrong I take Hotmail as an example.
This site is one of the largest in the world regarding free email to people
from all over the world. It is not only something which is targeting the
US. One can even choose when registering "Hotmail på svenska" which means
"Hotmail in Swedish" in English.

Now, do you think Hotmail can handle other characters than US-ASCII in
headers (header encoding of for example my last name "Fältström")? Do you
think Hotmail can handle other characters than US-ASCII in even the body of
a message?

Let me tell you the answers: No, and No.

Is Hotmail one site which "won't be getting much traffic anyway"?

Definitly not.

Hotmail is one of the largest problems we have on the Internet at the
moment just because they (a) don't follow the standards and (b) still get
lots of usage from users.

Now, why is this an argument for my discussion about "leakage"?

Just because Hotmail which have not even implemented non-US-ASCII
characters in MIME correctly, which have been around for quite some time,
what is the chance that it will implement suddenly non-US-ASCII characters
for IDN and addresses correctly?

The reason is that software companies which mainly is based in the US don't
have the experience (the programmers don't) of using non-US-ASCII
characters and because of that the implementations are "good enough" for
the largest portion of the market of the Internet -- which is the US.

Yes, I have tried to buy software from several US companies to Sweden, and
it is hard, very hard, because there is just no understanding of what
internationalization means.

And, I in Sweden still uses almost the same script as people in the english
speaking world. We only have three more characters which are "weird". It is
MUCH worse for people which do not even use the same kind of characters.

   paf