Re: Protection of hyphen

At 2:19 AM +0100 4/22/03, Roy Badami wrote:
>If it's worth protecting punctuation characters at all, then I think
>hyphen comes right at the top of the list of characters that it is
>useful to protect (probably tying with plus in importance).
>
>Indeed, the draft give the example of owner-listname (1.3) which isn't
>actually protected by the current proposal.

Note that "owner-listname" is a prime example of why we might *not* 
want to protect the hyphen. The hyphen in that name is not for making 
subaddresses: it is just there for preventing the two names from 
smooshing together.

>One simple approach would be to leave underscore unprotected instead,
>use xn__ as the ACE prefix and to use _ as the delimiter in
>bootstring.  Underscore is one of the few characters that would be
>safe to use in this way, since it has longstanding use in e-mail
>addresses of the form initials_surname.

"longstanding use" is probably an overstatement. Some people use it 
for that, others don't. It can be said to be a rarely-used character, 
and is certainly not used in normal non-computer writing.

The advantage of keeping the hyphen is again simplicity and 
parallelism with IDNA. Do we lean in one direction and move away from 
IDNA in a possibly-confusing fashion, or do we lean in the other 
direction and look very much like IDNA but possibly lose some 
perceived functionality? Right now, we have taken the second 
approach, but we are open to hearing other opinions.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium