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Re: Dual names, IDN and ASCII, in e-mail addresses?

2003-09-26 04:17:47

At 13:32 -0700 03-09-25, Dave Crocker wrote:
JP> This means that lots of people are going to have e-mail
JP> addresses like Göran(_at_)Müller(_dot_)de(_dot_) And one of the main

In order to see such addresses in their "native" form, when they are encoded
using IDN, people will need email (or other) software that understands IDN.
Hence, they will be using software that is "internationalized" in the
necessary manner.

I am not so sure. When I tried to view a web page in Greek
two months ago, a page which was using the Greek version of
ISO 8859, one web browser I used at one time said that I
had to install the greek alphabet or else not see the page
at all. (Another web browser showed the page, replacing
characters it did not support by "?"). So even though
mailers support IDN, this does not mean that they will
support all character sets which might occur in incoming
e-mail addresses.

And people still need to be able to have business cards
printed on paper containing their e-mail address.

At 13:32 -0700 03-09-25, Dave Crocker wrote:
People are already faced with this problem. It is not new to email. In fact,
it has almost nothing at all to do with email or IDN.

It has to do with user interface support for multiple character sets. I find
typing Spanish, in my US version of Windows to be onerous. And that only
involves a few accent marks.

But this has nothing to do with email. It has to do with software support for
typing more characters than are supported on my keyboard.

Do you mean that everyone all over the world has to learn
how to type Japanese or Chinese characters on their keyboards?
--


At 13:32 -0700 03-09-25, Dave Crocker wrote:
JP> Because of this, many people will have business cards with
JP> English information on one side, and information in their
JP> own language on the other side. They will then also have
JP> two e-mail addresses, since the ASCII version of IDN should
JP> obviously be hidden from humans as much as possible.

This is no different from the challenges that people have long been facing,
concerning postal addresses and even telephone numbers.

Phone numbers only contain digits, and thus do not have this
problem. Postal addresses are interpreted by human sorters
(if needed) in order to understand a postal address even
if it is spelled in non-normal ways. E-mail, however,
should work automatically! Jacob Palme <jpalme(_at_)dsv(_dot_)su(_dot_)se> (Stockholm University and KTH)
for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/jpalme/


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