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

2003-10-30 06:05:57
Ummm, I'm not a Genius of E-mail, but I have sent a few. :-}

The very-helpful scenario Valdis included a couple of notes back ("if
we punt on common ability to use Latin glyphs") has happened in my
life, at the presentation level - I've been swapping e-mail back and
forth with some very talented people in Korea. So, they have
ascii-fied e-mail addresses that aren't THAT obvious (I think spencer,
or dcrocker, or even vinton.c.cerf, is pretty obvious, but my three
kids are daddys_little_hurl (April), buddha20oz(Daniel), and
gypsycameo(Amy), so you're not going to figure out who's been copied
just by looking at e-mail addresses in the general case), and
presentation names that are localized, so I can't read them. If a
collaborator copies three people who I can't decode from the e-mail
address, and can't read from the presentation name, I can't figure out
if another researcher has been copied or not, without asking.

If I can't read the characters in the local part of the e-mail
address, there's even less chance I'll be able to figure out who's
been copied (and usually, figuring out who hasn't been copied is more
interesting, in my limited experience) - I know I'm going to regret
not reading Korean when I'm at IETF 59, but today, I don't read
Korean. Game over..

I agree with Dave in the general case ("the goal is to go beyond
today's Internet"), but am wondering if that also requires us to go
beyond today's language capability when we start leaking these
addresses between enclaves. I am sensitive to the comments expressed
in this thread, that a heckuva lot of people have to learn two sets of
glyphs, and I'm not one of them - I just don't see how we do it any
other way.

Oh, yeah - the other thing was, discussion about leaking out of a
Mongolian enclave is interesting, but leaking between two non-Latin
enclaves is where the rubber meets the road, and I've worked with too
many smart people from Asia/Pacific and from the Middle East to
believe that we wouldn't have two non-Latin enclaves who would be
collaborating about fifteen minutes after the second enclave starts
up...

Spencer

p.s. Because I'm not a Genius of Internationalization, I apologize for
using country names as if they were character sets in advance - hope
my comment is still somewhat clear.

p.p.s. If we DO discover life on Mars, I'm willing to change my mind.
I know my stepson would love ro have an excuse to learn
Martian/Klingon/etc....




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