Further thoughts on preferred printable representations...

[This is a followup to me previous post entitled "On humanly-readable
(printable) e-mail addresses"]

I meant to post this some time ago, but never found the time.

The prefered printable representation[1] of an e-mail address is a
vital concept, as I argue in my previous message.  It is what I print
on my business card.  It's what appears on advertising hoardings and
trailers for movies.

If I give you my business card, you can type it the address into your
e-mail client, and send a message to me.

When I send you an e-mail message, it's what appears on your display.
You can write this down on a piece of paper, give it to someone else,
and they can type it into their e-mail client to send me a message.

I can include one in the body of a message, and you can cut and paste
it into your e-mail client.

And you can do all this without any knowledge of Internet protocols or
the structure of Internet e-mail addresses; you can simply regard an
e-mail address (in its preferred printable representation) as an
opaque character string that you have to copy verbatim.

What struck me after I wrote my previous message is that it seems to
me that the primary goal of internationalized e-mail addresses is to
internationalize something that is not currently formally defined,
namely the preferred printable representation.

ie the primary goal of internationalization is to enable the same
kinds of interactions (typing an e-mail address from a business card,
writing an e-mail address down on paper) to work for users of
non-roman scripts.  Abstract representations and protocol
representations are just by-products of this that a user will never
see.

Far from being just a user-interface issue, for the (non-technical)
end-user, the opaque sequence of printable characters that they have
to copy verbatim is the _only_ thing that matters.

	-roy


[1] Yes, it's not a very accurate term.  Something like 'canonical
character-sequence serialization' would be better.