Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 07:32:46 +0800, James Seng said:
> to your opinion but please do so in other place, and not here. The group 
> is suppose to work on Internationalization of Email address 
> (identifiers), not debate whether we need it or not.
Any group that addresses "how" and "for which contexts" without having
a good grasp on "why" is inventing solutions in search of problems.

Mark actually *does* have a *very* valid point - on today's internet, if you
cannot recognize and enter the glyphs for at least c, h, m, o p, t, w, ':',
'@', '.', and '/' you are effectively unable to use the internet.  It may not
make any sense to you, but you can at least recognize and enter them (note that
this same issue was one of the biggest arguments against the .biz domain).

So.. having established that if they're currently using the internet, they can 
at least
recognize and enter the Latin glyphs, this raises a number of *very* important 
questions:

1) Is there reason to *not* expect said knowledge of Latin glyphs in the future?
If not, what user group(s) will be literate but not know the Latin charset?

2) Is a "community" approach acceptable?  Is usage of Han OK as long as
you're interacting with other Han users, or are the issues of leakage too high?

3) What *are* the issues of leakage? What am I expected to see if I get some 
Han,
and how am I to interact with it?  Equally important, what does the Han user do
with my leaked Latin-A characters?

4) Here's a somewhat related issue - looking at the U0100.pdf from 
www.unicode,org,
I had to enlarge page 2 quite a bit before I could see the difference between 
the glyphs
at 0114/0115 (capital/small e with breve) and 011A/011B (capital/small e with 
caron).
And I know my way around most of the Latin characters - our hypothetical Han
user is going to be swinging in the breeze if he gets a business card with 
e-caron on it.

And if you can't safely put e-caron on a business card, why are we bothering?

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