Re: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Dan Kohn writes:
> I believe sysadmins who care can use a punycode decoding tool (or
> Emacs macro) and that the vast majority won't care.

Won't care? _Won't care_?

Do you think that moving beyond ASCII is some sort of theoretical game?
You declare that the string "xyzzy" is a Greek alpha, you put "xyzzy" on
the screen, and you expect the user to pretend he's seeing an alpha?

Imagine that your computer's UI used octal instead of ABCDE etc. If you
want an A, you type 101, and see 101 on your screen. If you want a B,
you type 102, and see 102 on your screen. Maybe you have a special mail
viewer that shows you A and B and so on, but everything else you do with
the computer is in octal. How would you like that?

I expect that you'll respond by saying that the user interface is ``out
of scope.'' But declaring the failures of your solution to be ``out of
scope'' doesn't make them disappear; it simply makes you look foolish.

---D. J. Bernstein, Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics,
Statistics, and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago