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

An international email address would be portable as far a computers are
concerned; the issue would be for people: how to view it and how to key it in
(as you note). In both cases, that depends more on the client software than the
protocols.

I wouldn't be able to type in an email address in Tamil (though I could
certainly copy and paste it). I would wager that anyone who cares to have his
email used by foreigners would have dual email addresses, or perhaps even more;
e.g. Tamil, Latin, and Chinese.

Mark
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----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith Moore" <[email protected]>
To: "Mark Davis" <[email protected]>
Cc: <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>; <[email protected]>;
<[email protected]>; <[email protected]>
Sent: Tue, 2003 Oct 28 07:27
Subject: 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
>