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Re: a few short notes

2004-02-01 15:38:23

At 20:13 04/02/01 +0100, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

On 1-feb-04, at 18:49, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

recipient only, so they can be in any format, and others that must be more general so they must be in ASCII.

Why? what *technical* reason is there for this limitation?

Simple: not all computers support non-latin scripts. If I'm going to administer a mail system I must be able to set up filters and such which makes it necessary to have support for the scripts that I may need to filter. But I myself don't support any non-latin scripts (not counting half the greek alphabet) even with a computer that does (such as my Mac) this won't work well.

The administrator viewpoint is important. But there are many different
administrators. Administrators in China, for example, would most probably
prefer to use Chinese characters directly. You clearly prefer to deal
with a Chinese address in some transformed form. For interoperability,
only one form should be used in the protocol. The question now is
whether there are more Chinese looking at Chinese addresses, or
more others like you. Counting actual individual 'views', it's
very clear that 99% or so of viewings of Chinese addresses are
by Chinese, and only the remainder by guys like you (and me :-).

So what's better, overall, to design the protocol so that Chinese
can read Chinese directly (and Japanese can read Japanese directly,
and so on), and you may have to use a somewhat special setup if
you happen to come across a Chinese address, or the other way round?
The conclusion seems to be rather obvious.

Regards,   Martin.


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