In
<200310300624(_dot_)h9U6OX9X018995(_at_)turing-police(_dot_)cc(_dot_)vt(_dot_)edu>
Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu writes:
OK.. I get that part. Now for the big question: You're there in this
Mongolian intranet, and find you need to ask me a technical question,
so my address gets entered in ascii. OK so far. You now decide you
need to cc: somebody on the intranet so they know I've been asked.
1) What does that person do with my ascii-fied address?
2) How do I do a 'reply all' to both of you?
I would suppose that the Mongolian (who is probably using the Mongolified
version of OE) will see his own address in Mongolian and your address in
ASCII (because for sure Microsoft will have left an "ASCII back-door" in
Mongolified OE :-) ).
Those ASCII characters look like nothing he has ever seen before, he has no
idea how to type them in even if he wanted to, but he gathers from the
body of the message that this American guy has been brought into the
thread, so he clicks the Mongolian equivalent of "Reply-to-all" and hopes
for the best. And indeed his MUA should then manage to send your copy back
to you (understanding his reply is another matter, but that is your
problem).
Your copy of the original message is probably worse. Your ASCII address
will surely be there, but it is most unlikely that your MUA knows how to
display Mongolian characters. If it is a good MUA, it will display some
set of Latin characters (perhaps a punycode verion of the Mongolian ones)
such that if you laboriously and correctly typed them into another email
it would get sent to the right place.
If it is a poor MUA, then it will simply replace each undisplayable
character with a '?'. But even then, unless it is an absolutely abysmal
MUA, I would expect it to generate a correct return address from its
internal representation of those characters, not from the
'?????(_at_)????(_dot_)????(_dot_)???' on your screen.
3) How is your From: address encoded so it's usable *BOTH* from where
I am and from where your co-worker is?
For that, you need some unique representation of Unicode that can be input
to any computer worldwide. Inevitably, it is going to look like gibberish
in all but a few environments, and basing it on ASCII (e.g. punycode) is
the only solution that is likely to fly.
What this IEA effort needs to do is to decide whether it wants to go that
way, and if not what alternatives there are. At the moment, all solutions
seem to have disadvantages, but that may be a part of the fundamental
nature of the problem. There is no law of nature which states that all
problems have a solution acceptable to all parties which will surely
become apparent if we debate them for a sifficient number of years.
--
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_)clerew(_dot_)man(_dot_)ac(_dot_)uk Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave,
CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K.
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