>On Mar 19, "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to> wrote: > >> Go sell a Greek user an ``internationalized domain name'' with a delta, >> Pete. Then tell him that most of his correspondents will see the delta >> as incomprehensible gobbledygook rather than a delta. See what he says. Okay, I'm not Greek, but as the registered owner of .com, I'll tell you*. I expect that some windoze users will display it (.com) as a box dot com; mac users will display it as a delta dot com; and everyone else will display it as a bq--eida.com (RACE), or dq--uuyg.com (DUDE), or zq---h9g.com (AMZ_C), or punycode, or whatever -- AND, they will continue to do so until they have the appropriate software on their machines to handle the conversion. That's what I expect. On the other hand, I do not expect that the IDN will eventually produce something that will transparently produce the appropriate glyphs on millions of users machines. In my mind, that's simply not possible because I think it requires that every machine on this planet have a complete copy of UNICODE installed and available. Granted, I am clueless about a lot of this IDN stuff and I may be "hubris" (as Mr. Paul Hoffman once informed me) in my offering my opinion to the "Gods of the Internet", but I do think I see the distinction between which side of the modem one is on and what responsibility lies in each camp. >OK, scenario 1: > >You tell him that although it's gobbledygook to people without greek >alphabet support, it will still work. It's not convenient, but it WILL work. >Guaranteed. For his business colleagues and friends in Greece, who DO have >the latest and greatest software, it will display as a delta. His ISP hasn't >had to upgrade, and everybody in the world can use his domain - eventually >they will see it as a delta as well, but for now they see it as an encoded >string they can still use no problem. ><-snip> >If you were IT director of a large firm, and you had a choice as to which to >roll out, which would you choose? > >-- >Paul Robinson I would vote for scenario 1. Besides, IMHO (in my hubris opinion) that's the only way it's going to work. tedd * The Greek version of "delta" registers a internal error -- it's the Math language set that provides an acceptable "delta". -- http://sperling.com