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

Mark Crispin scripsit:

> > That's like asking how many languages should appear on your business card.
> > As many as the different kinds of people with whom you habitually interact.
> 
> That is not a satisfactory answer to the question.
> 
> I am engaged in software support.  I habitually interact with people from
> around the planet.  Any proposal, that states that someone like me must
> maintain hundreds (if not thousands) of email addresses, is a non-starter.

First of all, there aren't hundreds of scripts in live use.  Second,
you probably support people in at most five languages, using at most
two or three scripts, unless you are a prodigy.  (You may have more
nationalized versions of some products than that, but you probably
can't handle more than that many languages *in email*.)  An address
like "[email protected]" might need a hundred variants, but you
certainly won't.

For myself, I support people in English, and I need to be able to
recognize support requests in French and Spanish so that I can route them
to the right places.  A single Latin-script email address is sufficient
for this.  Adding a Cyrillic-script email address would be as silly
as adding Russian contact information to my business card: I can't do
anything for people who want to communicate with me in Russian anyway.

> > No address is quite domestic-only, though it may be a meaningless jumble
> > to people who are interacting with the ASCII representation.
> 
> Again, that assumes a requirement that (as far as I can tell) has not been
> made.

Well, it's certainly what John's draft prescribes.  As for the fullwidth @,
the only significance of that is that it's folded into an ASCII @ before
doing anything else, so that people who type a fullwidth @ instead of an
ASCII one are not inconvenienced too much.

> If that truly is the requirement, we can have a very short meeting; just
> sufficient to say "just use UTF-7" (or any other politically correct
> rendering of the day), get the hum, and go home.

That doesn't address appropriate folding, nor does it avoid stepping on
email addresses that are likely to be already in use.

-- 
I suggest you call for help,                    John Cowan
or learn the difficult art of mud-breathing.    [email protected]
        --Great-Souled Sam                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan