There are working groups preparing revisions to the DNS to allow domain
names using all sorts of strange charsets. Effectivle, the whole of
Unicode is available, though I gather they are going to keep a pretty
tight control over what is properly allowed, with all sorts of
normalization rules, etc.
Question:
Has any thought been given to how such charsets will appear in mail
addresses? Some extension to RFC 2047, perhaps, to allow it to be used
within addr-specs?
My immediate problem is this. There is a convention that if you want to
post a news article to comp.foo.moderated, then you email it to
comp-foo-moderated(_at_)moderators(_dot_)isc(_dot_)org
and in due course it gets approved (or not) by the moderator, and appears
on Usenet. Observe the convention (now built into all news systems)
whereby each '.' in the newsgroup-name is converted to a '-'. So far, so
good.
In the future, however, there will be newsgroup-names involving non-ASCII
character set, such as
dk.test.blåbægrød
(That is our standard example on the USEFOR list - it means blueberry
porridge I believe). The charset in which it will be expressed will be
UTF-8 (it is in iso-8859-1 in this article, just so people are more
likely to be able to read it). But emailing that to
dk-test-blåbægrød(_at_)moderators(_dot_)isc(_dot_)org
will not work because such characters are not allowed in email headers
(and we really want an address that will pass through the present mailing
system).
So we need to invent YET ANOTHER ENCODING (TM) of 8-bit into ASCII (and
this one does not have to be particularly readable, because it will be
generated automatically). So we might invent something like
"=?utf-8?q?dk-test-bl=c3=a5b=c3=a6gr=c3=b8d?="@moderators.isc.org
which is actually perfectly legal at the moment. It is just a
quoted-string full of ASCII characters, and any resemblance to RFC 2047 is
"purely coincidental" (of course).
But my reason for bringing it up on this list is to ask whether there are
any other moves afoot to deal with problems of this nature. Because, if
there are, then I don't want to be reinventing yet more unnecessary wheels.
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
Email: chl(_at_)clw(_dot_)cs(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Snail: 5
Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5