Folks,
Just to make this explicit, SM's note is to the rest of you, not to me. I asked
him to solicit comments from the group, since I have only tried to make the
document parrot what I8N folk say. My own comprehension of the topic remains
muddled.
d/
SM wrote:
Hello,
Section 6.3 of draft-crocker-email-arch is about Internationalization.
Quoting the draft:
"Because its origins date back to the use of ASCII, Internet Mail has
had an ongoing challenge to support the wide range of necessary
international data representations. For a discussion of this topic,
see [MAIL-I18N]."
MAIL-I18N is a report on "Using International Characters in Internet
Mail" published in 1998. There is an existing IETF WG working on email
internationalization. The EAI WG published a SMTP Extension for
Internationalized Email Addresses as an Experimental RFC and there are
some existing implementations. I don't think that it is worth
referencing MAIL-I18N when there is newer work in the area of email
internationalization.
I suggest having the following for Section 6.3 with appropriate
references to RFC 5336.
Because its origins date back to the use of ASCII, Internet Mail has
had an ongoing challenge to support the wide range of necessary
international data representations. RFC 5336 specifies an SMTP
extension, as an Experimental Protocol, for transport and delivery
of email messages with internationalized email addresses or header
information.
There is an issue in that it is an Experimental Protocol and it may not
belong in a document about the existing Internet Mail architecture. The
alternative is to mention the ongoing EAI work to standardize
internationalized email.
Could you please comment about this?
Regards,
-sm
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net