Forget Mongolian. Think Chinese and Hindi, plus related languages that use their character sets. Between the two of them you have nearly 3 billion potential users, i.e. half the world's population. Admittedly not all of them are literate, and many do understand the Latin character set, but this is still a very large group to disenfranchise. There is a second thread to your argument which I object to. Just because many Internet users can understand the Latin character set does not mean they do not want to send stuff in their native character set, or be forced to use the Latin character set. Of course so far we have made it impossible to do so. I do not understand the difficulty in making the software 8-bit byte clean - it does not need to understand what the characters are - just that they are different from each other. It does not even need to know that one character actually takes three bytes to specify. In fact, there is an encoding, UTF-8, that makes most program changes unnecessary, since it maps 128 ASCII 1:1. Then let the users decide what they want to do. Why place unnecessary restrictions on the Internet just because it results in messages that you personally can't understand? Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote: > > On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 13:33:31 +0800, Tan Tin Wee said: > > And if they need to send email to outsiders, then they would > > send in ASCII email address, as routinely as they would > > OK.. I get that part. Now for the big question: You're there in this > Mongolian intranet, and find you need to ask me a technical question, > so my address gets entered in ascii. OK so far. You now decide you > need to cc: somebody on the intranet so they know I've been asked. > > 1) What does that person do with my ascii-fied address? > 2) How do I do a 'reply all' to both of you? > > 3) How is your From: address encoded so it's usable *BOTH* from where > I am and from where your co-worker is? > > 3a) Can you achieve goal (3) while using the same From: as you would use > if you were mailing ONLY to the intranet (so people don't have to maintain > 2 differently encoded values for your address for filtering purposes, etc). > > If whatever Mongolia was doing was guaranteed to stay in Mongolia, it wouldn't > be an issue. However, people inside the enclave *will* want to communicate > with outsiders as well - and the instant you allow an e-mail to cross the > border, you have to get all these types of issues sorted out. > > Mark Crispin's point was that currently, knowledge of Latin glyphs *is* > assumed, and as far as anybody has evidenced, this hypothetical Mongolian > intranet with many non-Latin-aware users is still hypothetical - and with no > evidence saying there actually IS one in the works someplace. So Mark quite > reasonably pointed out that it may very well make more *engineering* sense to > simply train the very small number of users who don't know Latin glyphs than to > come up with some very convoluted scheme that annoys everybody else. > > The tail has to be a certain size before it's able to wag the dog. > > --------------------------------------------------------------- > > Part 1.2 Type: application/pgp-signature