RE: The typing issue

["Dan Kohn" <dan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

D. J. Bernstein wrote:

> Let me put it this way. Someone gives you a business card. The card
> has an email address. The email address has (say) Japanese characters
> that you've never seen before. How do you type those characters?

> Answer: The card shows you, on the next line, what to type, thanks to
> a universal keyboard standard for Unicode, namely ISO 14755. Done.

> The only alternative proposal I've seen is forcing every international
> user to set up a second email address---an ASCII address. Why waste
> all that effort to work around the typing issue, imposing extra costs
> on billions of users, when we can simply have keyboard interfaces
> support a perfectly straightforward standard that allows everything
> to be typed? 

There is an alternative to registering an ASCII domain for each IDN:
instead, you can print the punycode on the business card below the
IMAA/IDN email address.

Compared to ISO 14755 [1], it seems to me that punycode is more
universal (it works wherever ASCII is available), more compact (it
supports LDH rather than hex), and no more ugly than ISO 14755.

Take an email address on a business card of
<sono><supiido><de>@example.com (where the bracketed characters would be
shown as kanji).

Not knowing Japanese, I'd rather see (and type)
xn--d9juau41awczczp@xxxxxxxxxxx than u+305D u+306E u+30B9 u+30D4 u+30FC
u+30C9 u+3067@xxxxxxxxxxx where for each u+ I need to hold down
ctrl-alt.  Of course, we both agree that they could also set up
sonosupiidode@xxxxxxxxxxx to forward to the same mailbox.

Of course, I know how much Dan hates punycode and so he'll hate this
suggestion.

[1] http://www-rocq.inria.fr/qui/Philippe.Deschamp/divers/ALB-CD.html


          - dan
--
Dan Kohn <mailto:dan@xxxxxxxxxxx>
<http://www.dankohn.com/>  <tel:+1-650-327-2600>