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

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <> John C Klensin <klensin@xxxxxxx> writes:

>(1) Another advantage of "just" using UTF-8 in an appropriately
>negotiated, controlled, and constrained environment is that any
>idiosyncracies and coding difficulties are Unicode
>idiosyncracies and coding difficulties.  If we decide to use a
>specialized coding designed for email local-parts (and, fwiw, I
>think Adam's coding solution is brilliant... I'm ultimately just
>unhappy with the problem definition to which it responds), then
>we have to deal with both its idiosyncracies _and_ those of
>Unicode.  Strikes me as a bad idea -- better to just blame
>"them" :-)

Exactly so. "Just send UTF-8" is undoubtedly going to happen, and probably
sooner rather than later. All the IETF can do is to try to ensure that the
transition to it is an orderly one.

Therefore, solutions to this problem should be on the assumption that
ultimately "just send UTF-8" will happen, and they should look sensible in
that context. That then means the solutions can be based on Unicode
practice (which will already be dealing with rather similar problems in
other protocols). Issues such as what normalization and/or strinprep to
use, who is responsible for doing the normalization, and when, how wide
your "@" character should be (and doesn't NFKC and/or stringprep already
narrow it anyway?), and so on.

Encodings into and out of punycode (and other encodings) will be needed
during a transitional period, and that period may well last for a very
long time. But the system must appear to the users as if the UTF-8 had
indeed travelled end to end, and eventually that should be exactly what it
does.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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