Subject: Re: Is it good to publish a new RFC on SMTP without internationalisation?

From: Charles Lindsey <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 21:27:43 +0000 (GMT)

On Fri, 17 Mar 2000 09:20:00 -0500
	Keith Moore <[email-masked]> said...

> that's exactly the point.  you cannot add internationalization to 
> electronic mail by making a simple change to a single protocol.or
> application.

But it would be an essential first move, which would facilitate the
others in due course. And even if it would not of itself solve the
internationalization of addresses, it would still be a useful move from
the POV of Subject headers, phrases, and other things which are less
critical, but are nevertheless porrly served by the present RFC2047
method.

> 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.

Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Email:     [email-masked]  Web:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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From: Terje Bless <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 22:10:57 +0100

On 18.03.00 at 21:27, Charles Lindsey <[email-masked]> wrote:

>exotic places

Your premise is false. Those sending mail _to_ exotic places, and every
jump inbetween, must also understand them.

/me playing devils advocate. :-)

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From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 2000 22:22:38 -0500

> others in due course. 

so we don't know where we're going, but it's essential that we start
out in some ill-conceived direction as quickly as possible?  right.

the move you are suggesting is a move in the wrong direction - one 
which would seriously degrade interoperability without providing
any useful benefit, and the damage done would be very difficult
from which to recover.

> And even if it would not of itself solve the

subject headers etc are a separate issue because you don't have to
deal with things like canonicalization and comparison.  I would like 
to see human-readable text move to UTF-8 at some point.  Even then, 
the machinery needed to process the combination of UTF-8 and RFC 2047
(which is, after all, widely deployed) is more complex than the
machinery needed to handle RFC 2047 alone.  And mail readers need
to handle RFC 2047 so that they can process old messages in message stores.
So moving to UTF-8 actually increases the complexity of a mail reader.

> is enough to show us that that is NOT the way to go. 

it WAS the way to go at the time.  we needed a solution in 1991, and
ISO 10646 was not available to us at that time.  

> Don't forget that
> exotic places, 

that's simply not true.   (and what's "exotic" anyway?)

Keith

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From: Maynard Kang <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2000 14:38:49 +0800

> 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