On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:50:06AM -0500, John Stracke wrote:
Dave Aronson wrote:
Think also of many businesses that cater to the general public, from
bleeding-edge geeks like us, to those who can barely spell PDA and
don't know what one is.
I think the only times I've seen anybody use PDAs to exchange contact
information were at IETF meetings, in the hallways, when people had time
to kill. It just takes too long. Typically, when two companies are
meeting, and you've got, say, four people on each side, everybody swaps
business cards in under a minute, and you're done. Doing the same thing
via IR would hold the meeting up too long.
Agree. Another point is that many firms print contact / support / sales
mail addresses on documents. So may also individuals in some
circumstances (teachers on the hard copy of their teaching doc,
classified advertisements on newspapers, etc.). Though one may conceive
adverts with a bluetooth device broadcasting contact information, I
believe printed material is still a significant way of obtaining email
addresses and will be so for a long.
Regarding the actual issue (IEA), the technical problem of having to
enter an address in an unknown charset may solve itself almost
naturally: people who feel concerned about being reachable by anyone
abroad would create/buy/ask-their-admin-for a ascii address, while
others would get locale encoded addresses for a local use. A kind of a
social consensus.
--
Jean-Jacques Puig
[homepage] http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~puig/