Re: Problems of Internationalized Mail Address eXtensions (IMAX)

Claus Färber <[email protected]> wrote:

> The interesting part is that the IDNA WG seems to have missed the
> main advantage of their own IDNA design:
> IDNAs have a Unicode version (e.g. for the 1 billion Chinese people who
> understand Chinese characters) and an ASCII-only version (for the Greek
> person who does not).

I don't know if I'd call it the "main" advantage, but I agree that it's
handy, and it was discussed by people in the working group.

> The IDNA spec says: ``ACE labels are unsuitable for display to
> users.''  But that is not true: They are perfectly suitable for
> display to users who don't know the Unicode characters encoded within
> an ACE label.

Yeah, somehow that idea didn't make it into the spec.  I don't remember
if that was deliberate, or merely because we never thought to put it in.

In any case, it's a user-interface issue, and the spec does permit
applications to show the ACE at the user's request, so it's no tragedy
that the spec neglects to mention this reason why users might sometimes
ask to see the ACE.

AMC