Re: FYI: BOF on Internationalized Email Addresses (IEA)

> It is currently impossible to use the Internet without knowing the Latin script.
> However, the goal of most well-designed client software and operating systems is
> to permit the user to work entirely within their native language, with a fully
> localized system. This is reaching to India and other countries; Microsoft has
> introduced fully localized versions of Indic Windows just recently, and Linux
> vendors are hard at work to produce fully localized versions of their software.
> 
> Email and Web addresses are the big remaining holdouts for most people. People
> should not be forced to use a script that they are unfamiliar with, just to use
> email addresses and sites in their own countries. Even if they are familiar with
> the Latin script, it is very often a very bad match for their languages, making
> it very difficult to figure out how native words would be spelled in it.

and yet, as we've seen time and time again, local use of nonportable addresses
can cause major problems for the net as a whole.   we saw this in earlier days
of email with the admixture of bitnet/rscs/nje, uucp, decnet, x.400, and Internet
addresses.  we've seen it in the IP space with RFC 1918 addresses.

in some ways internationalizing email addresses is a much harder problem than
internationalizing IDNs, because no other application is as dependent on having
human beings actually use addresses as email.  (yes, people do sometimes type in
URLs, but not nearly as often as they click on links.  and there are apps which
require humans to type in domain names, but for most of them this only happens 
at configuration time.)

one way to approach this problem might be to make email less dependent on having
addresses typed in.

Keith