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Re: [idn] WG last call summary

"Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote:

> When you give somebody your email address...  Wouldn't you stick with
> the 822-compliant form, knowing that the sacrosanct 822 encoding is
> going to work?

If I'm giving the address to people familiar with Latin letters, then
I'd stick to the 822 form.  If I'm giving the address to someone very
unfamiliar with Latin letters, so much so that the probability that they
fail to copy the address correctly exceeds the probability that their
mail program cannot handle non-ASCII characters, then it would make
sense to give them non-ASCII characters.

> > I maintain that IDNA does *not* extend or alter any data types.
>
> Call it "replaces" if you wish, it is the same effect.  The data being
> presented to the user is not the Message-ID that has always been
> presented in the same manner, those things which look URLs aren't
> actually URLs anymore, and so forth.

People commonly pass around things that are not URLs, like
"www.example.com", and yet most browsers transform it into a correct URL
"http://www.example.com/";.  It will be a similar story when people start
passing around non-ASCII strings to be entered into browsers.

> It should be pointed out here that removing the mandatory
> transliteration gives the collective Internet more options, not fewer
> options.

I think "mandatory" is an overstatement.  The IDNA draft says "ACE
labels obtained from domain name slots SHOULD be hidden from users
except when the use of the non-ASCII form would cause problems or when
the ACE form is explicitly requested."  I think that leaves sufficient
room for application designers to exercise their own good judgement.

That said, I wouldn't really care if it instead said "ACE labels
obtained from domain name slots MAY be displayed to users as equivalent
non-ACE labels."  (And similar softening of the various recommendations
that follow from it in section 6.)

I don't think such a change is necessary, but I wouldn't object to it.
You'll probably still face resistance from others though.

AMC