James; Trying to reply your mail, my mailer says: [Charset Windows-1252 unsupported, skipping...] so, could you learn not to Microsoft centric and to use proper charset for the International discussion of IETF? > While the discussion of the use of various character set is interesting > topic, one which is also of interest to IDN WG, such prolonged discussion > are better carried out in a forum which is dedicated to this, such as > intloc-discuss@ops.ietf.org, a list which is formed to talk about the > generic problem of I18N and L10N in IETF, and not IDN. I believe IDN, or bogosity of it, worthes attracting generic attention of IETF. > Please bring it over to the other list and when/if there is a conclusion, > please keep the IDN informed. As you could have seen, on IETF mailing list, Harald and I have, at least, agreed that, if you use unicode based encoding, local context (or locale) must be carried out of band I think Harald's language tag is highly semantical and is not useful for purely lexical (not even syntactic) issues such as charset disambiguation or space elimination for format=flowed. For example, the follwing Japanese text in Romaji script: IDN tte zenzen dame follows, as you can easily guess, usual folding rules for Latin-based scripts. But, anyway, the discussion so far in IETF list is enough to deny IDN. I'm happy to discontinue the thread, then. Masataka Ohta PS I have found a theory to deny PKI and to explain why public key cryptograpy is not so polular dispite the efforts of ISO, which will destory entire business of a company or companies owing several important TLDs. So, don't bother to say that there are so many so-called-international- but-actuallly-local domain names registered.