Re: what is the real problem?

At 03:01 12/11/03, Keith Moore wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>>not quite - all that is required is that there be one address that is
>>>transcribable by any potential recipient.  but for me it's an open
>>>question as to whether a Latin alphabet / ASCII-encoded fallback is
>>>sufficient, given the absence of those characters on many of the
>>>world's keyboards.
>>
>>If you can't count on Basic Latin, I very much doubt that there is
>>anything you can count on.
>
>digit strings.  no, I don't like that idea, and I'm rather hoping that a 
>Latin fallback is sufficient.  but I can easily imagine situations where 
>it might not be sufficient.

May I suggest that the difficulty comes here too from wanting to do too 
many things at the same layer. Please consider there are two _different_ 
and _ independent_ layers.

1. the infromation used by the networks protocols
2. the information used by the people

Up to now the character set used by the protocol was the same as the 
charcacter set used by the people. So we did not need a presentation tool. 
IDNA was the first one. Now we want to make the presentation more beautiful 
for those wanting/needing it. OK, let do it. This is at the people layer, 
this does not change anythng at the network layer level, unless you want to 
bundle them.

I will take an example we all know. Numeric Telephone keypads also wear 
letters, so you can chose a number for the way it spells. If typing a 
company slogan on your telephone pad is good for their marketing, this does 
not change anything for the telephone network. It still uses digits.

IMHO Vint proposed the right approach. To consider that the internet uses 
numerics only, ranging from 0 to Z. And that cute American people managed 
to get themselves a language which permits to memorize some of these 
numbers easily as names. (what are the numbers in Chinese for "ali-baba"?)

Keith's demands for the users are missing many requirements because users 
first want to live with their system, to be polite, to be legal, to 
organize themselves, to get aliases, etc. etc. This what I name vernacular. 
But it also spells a few very good things, including that I must be able to 
understand what the other person says on the phone and to translate it into 
a mail name. This is the way the world works : we could not fly if pilots 
the world over were not spelling names from "zero to niner and from alpha 
to zulu". These are no Latin characters, these are universal figures from 
zero to 36 we also used in scott and morse. Add the dash and the dot if you 
want, this is OK everyone knows. You will note that the world over what the 
people noticed when they started using mail names, was that there was a new 
"figure": @. They made it the symbole of the net.

So there are 40 figures available: 0 9, A-4 - . and @. Let accept and 
document it, and let help people do what they want with them. This is far 
more an OPES matter than an e-mail or a DNS matter.

For example, they want to enter multilingual domain names with TLD in 
Chinese. The solution is not to go lat.root, to create new TLDs, or to 
build and disseminate plug-ins. It is to get an OPES at the proper place to 
replace ".COM" in Chinese by ".com" in 'network scriping". Watever the way 
"COM" may spell in the 5000 languages of the world, the only problem is to 
make sure that "NET" Japanese does not conflict with "COM" in Polish.

This will give time to totally rething an e-mail system where spam will not 
fit. What is the real use to work on a system people start quitting ?

jfc