Subject: Re: [idn] An open letter to the IDN WG (long)

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 17:46:17 -0500

Andrea,

No offense intended, and the reference is very much
real-calendar-dependent as well as generational.  My mother does
quite well with a manual typewriter (I no longer do), but can't
handle email addresses consistently.  However, she continues to
struggle with them, while many of the males of her generation
appear to be concerned enough about acknowledging their lack of
knowledge to stay completely away from computers.    My brother's
and sister's children --who are old enough that their becoming
parents would be quite plausible-- have no problems with email
addresses and about half of them can type efficiently in a
non-Roman script or two, but consider manual typewriters to be
archaic museum pieces.  

Your specific experience may differ, but I think we should be
very reluctant to standardize on a technology approach that would
exclude _either_ generation or ones either earlier or later.
And I think the marketplace would ignore or punish us if we tried.

My earlier comments were shorthand for that explanation; there
was no intention to deprecate the skills or learning ability of
any particular gender or age group.

    john

--On Thursday, 22 March, 2001 10:39 -0800 "A. Vine"
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> Er, I appreciate the discussion, but not the singling out of
> mothers and grandmothers.  I may one day be one of the above,
> and I'd like to think that I know as much about entering
> character data in any charset in any fashion than one person
> can know when it isn't something they do exclusively. Thank you
> for remembering that non-technical people are not necessarily
> women with children, particularly older ones.
> 
> Andrea Vine
> P.S.  I knit too.