On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:50:06AM -0500, John Stracke wrote: > Dave Aronson wrote: > > >Think also of many businesses that cater to the general public, from > >bleeding-edge geeks like us, to those who can barely spell PDA and > >don't know what one is. > > > I think the only times I've seen anybody use PDAs to exchange contact > information were at IETF meetings, in the hallways, when people had time > to kill. It just takes too long. Typically, when two companies are > meeting, and you've got, say, four people on each side, everybody swaps > business cards in under a minute, and you're done. Doing the same thing > via IR would hold the meeting up too long. > Agree. Another point is that many firms print contact / support / sales mail addresses on documents. So may also individuals in some circumstances (teachers on the hard copy of their teaching doc, classified advertisements on newspapers, etc.). Though one may conceive adverts with a bluetooth device broadcasting contact information, I believe printed material is still a significant way of obtaining email addresses and will be so for a long. Regarding the actual issue (IEA), the technical problem of having to enter an address in an unknown charset may solve itself almost naturally: people who feel concerned about being reachable by anyone abroad would create/buy/ask-their-admin-for a ascii address, while others would get locale encoded addresses for a local use. A kind of a social consensus. -- Jean-Jacques Puig [homepage] http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~puig/