An international email address would be portable as far a computers are
concerned; the issue would be for people: how to view it and how to key it in
(as you note). In both cases, that depends more on the client software than the
protocols.
I wouldn't be able to type in an email address in Tamil (though I could
certainly copy and paste it). I would wager that anyone who cares to have his
email used by foreigners would have dual email addresses, or perhaps even more;
e.g. Tamil, Latin, and Chinese.
Mark
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http://www.macchiato.com
► शिष्यादिच्छेत्पराजयम् ◄
----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Moore" <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
To: "Mark Davis" <mark(_dot_)davis(_at_)jtcsv(_dot_)com>
Cc: <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>;
<MRC(_at_)cac(_dot_)washington(_dot_)edu>; <ams(_at_)wiw(_dot_)org>;
<ietf-imaa(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>; <ietf-822(_at_)imc(_dot_)org>
Sent: Tue, 2003 Oct 28 07:27
Subject: Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)
It is currently impossible to use the Internet without knowing the Latin
script.
However, the goal of most well-designed client software and operating
systems is
to permit the user to work entirely within their native language, with a
fully
localized system. This is reaching to India and other countries; Microsoft
has
introduced fully localized versions of Indic Windows just recently, and
Linux
vendors are hard at work to produce fully localized versions of their
software.
Email and Web addresses are the big remaining holdouts for most people.
People
should not be forced to use a script that they are unfamiliar with, just to
use
email addresses and sites in their own countries. Even if they are familiar
with
the Latin script, it is very often a very bad match for their languages,
making
it very difficult to figure out how native words would be spelled in it.
and yet, as we've seen time and time again, local use of nonportable addresses
can cause major problems for the net as a whole. we saw this in earlier days
of email with the admixture of bitnet/rscs/nje, uucp, decnet, x.400, and
Internet
addresses. we've seen it in the IP space with RFC 1918 addresses.
in some ways internationalizing email addresses is a much harder problem than
internationalizing IDNs, because no other application is as dependent on
having
human beings actually use addresses as email. (yes, people do sometimes type
in
URLs, but not nearly as often as they click on links. and there are apps
which
require humans to type in domain names, but for most of them this only happens
at configuration time.)
one way to approach this problem might be to make email less dependent on
having
addresses typed in.
Keith