Message-ID: <38D5C779.563CDC92@pobox.org.sg>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 14:38:49 +0800
From: Maynard Kang <maynard@pobox.org.sg>
Reply-To: maynard@pobox.org.sg
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: Charles Lindsey <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>
CC: DRUMS <drums@cs.utk.edu>
Subject: Re: Is it good to publish a new RFC on SMTP without 
 internationalisation?
References: <200003182127.VAA13919@clw.cs.man.ac.uk>
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Charles Lindsey wrote:
> > one inescapable conclusion of the incremental deployment constraint is
> > that there absolutely must be a pure-ascii encoded form of i18n address
> > which is as equally valid (as a sender or recipient address) as the
> > utf-8 format.
> 
> And there I totally disagree with you. Surely the mess that is RFC 2047
> is enough to show us that that is NOT the way to go. Don't forget that
> mail to exotic addresses need only be understood by people living in
> exotic places, and they will be the first to upgrade their software to
> whatever new standard is agreed.

Now that seems to me like an entirely chauvinistic view of the
internationalization process. It doesn't mean that just because I have a
non-English e-mail address, I want to communicate only with individuals
who have similar non-English addresses. Please do not assume that the
world is effectively monolingual.

Sometimes the solution isn't as simple as to "upgrade" the software
especially when upgrading involves a great deal of localization to such
an extent whereby it refuses to interoperate. Being backward-compatible
is always essential to any large scale infrastructure change.

And it would be much appreciated if you do not use the word "exotic" in
this context. Try to be a bit more culturally sensitive.

Maynard