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

At 01:24 30/10/2003 -0500, [email protected] wrote:
>On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:33:31 +0800, Tan Tin Wee said:
> >snip
>If whatever Mongolia was doing was guaranteed to stay in Mongolia, it wouldn't
>be an issue.  However, people inside the enclave *will* want to communicate
>with outsiders as well - and the instant you allow an e-mail to cross the
>border, you have to get all these types of issues sorted out.
>
>Mark Crispin's point was that currently, knowledge of Latin glyphs *is*
>assumed, and as far as anybody has evidenced, this hypothetical Mongolian
>intranet with many non-Latin-aware users is still hypothetical - and with no
>evidence saying there actually IS one in the works someplace.  So Mark quite
>reasonably pointed out that it may very well make more *engineering* sense to
>simply train the very small number of users who don't know Latin glyphs 
>than to
>come up with some very convoluted scheme that annoys everybody else.

Hi

The above is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Of course you have to have a 
knowledge of Latin glyphs because the only Internet around is based on it.
The millions of people (including Mongolians) who don't know latin glyphs 
(and may not yet have computers, and may be illiterate) are still the 
future users, possibly the majority of future users, of the Internet and 
this effort is to address their future needs.

My observation is that we are maybe worrying too much about the characters 
being represented and how they are used, We should merely define a 
protocol. In my book that protocol should allow email addresses to carry 
the widest possible eight-bit ASCII payload. (ie. everything except control 
characters) so that existing non-unicode special characters can be carried, 
and can also carry IDN-style unicoded characters.

Sure there will be problems, - there will be anyway. However we need to 
enable local users to communicate in local scripts in the local language.

In this regard Europeans and Americans are maybe too steeped in the 
existing latin/ASCII to address this issue.  We should listen carefully to 
the non-latin world rather than trying to find reasons not to do it.

I often get completely incomprehensible emails which originated in 
non-latin scripts - I just delete them. I know they're not important for me 
because no author who tries to write to me in Chinese is going to get very 
far no matter what communication medium he uses. Why? Because I don't speak 
Chinese.

>The tail has to be a certain size before it's able to wag the dog.

This dog is almost all tail!

Regards

Steve Dyer