Re: IEA Bottom Line

--On Monday, 03 November, 2003 13:24 -0500 Jeffrey Altman 
<[email protected]> wrote:

> John:
>
> Thank you for your continued rationality.
>
> I do not have a strong opinion on what the solution to this
> problem should look like.  However, I am concerned about some
> related problems.  Local mail parts are often derived from or
> are usernames.  Administrators like the ability to be able to
> assign a single name to an end user for the purpose of user
> identity.  It is my hope that whatever conclusion is reached
> will ensure that the i18n mechanism will allow this single
> single name to be compatible with existing naming conventions
> utilized with Kerberos, SASL, X.509, etc.  It would I believe
> detrimental to everyone if the various protocols which must
> manipulate user identities did not have a common way of
> representing them.

Jeffrey,

I think this is an important point.  The question is what to do 
about it.  One extreme view is that we should, because of those 
issues, say "usernames must be confined to simple, IA5, strings 
because that is the only way to get guaranteed interoperability 
with all of these things with a single string".  I don't think 
that is going to fly in the areas in which people are really 
determined to internationalize usernames and email addresses. 
Nor do I think that those folks are going to accept an encoding 
that causes user names to look as expected in some contexts and 
a hard-to-verify form in others -- users won't see it as the 
same, or common, representation of their names.  So, at worst, 
we should be sure that people understand the tradeoffs, 
regardless of what i18n system is adopted: localization versus 
global interoperability, localization versus a single identifier 
as username, mailbox address, and Kerberos/ SASL/ X.509 
certification or credential name.

I'll try to work some words to that effect into -02 of my email 
document so it doesn't get lost.

Much more than that we probably can't do, any more than saying 
"I18n Bad" or "I18n risky" or "I18n less interoperable" is going 
to prevent anyone who thinks they are needed from deploying 
_something_ for very long.

regards,
     john