> Over the last ten years, I explained a zillion times to my > management, workmates, etc. why e-mail addresses cannot > contain accented characters, only to be asked when the IT > department of the organization is going to "fix it". This is > the archetypical example of an issue that has been known > since the days of RFC821/822. Yet, work to address this has > only started a year ago, although I am conscious there were > some intermediate step needed, like Unicode. For this to work, we need a way to display that address on devices which do not have the complete set of Unicode glyphs installed. And we also need a way to display a representation of the address that can be used to unambiguously input the address on a device which does not understand the full set of Unicode glyphs. This was discussed a couple of days ago in this message http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg47925.html regarding deprecating RFC 1345 because it is the wrong solution to the problem. In fact, it may be necessary to attach a language tag (defined in RFC 4646 and 4647) to these addresses in order to make this fully possible. For instance, there is a Norwegian mans' name which is usually written Hakon in English. In Norwegian, the letter a is written with a small ring attached to the top. This ring represents that the name is pronounced more like Hokon than Hakon. Nevertheless, it is standard for people to us a double a to represent this glyph (a-ring) when writing Norwegian with devices which do not have the a-ring glyph. But Haakon is even more misleading to English eyes. In order for an email display and entry device to fully make sense of addresses which contain a glyph not available on the device, it may be necessary to know both the language tag of the device user, as well as the language tag of the address. I'm sure that many people are working on this problem, but most of this work is happening outside of the IETF. Perhaps even in commercial ventures like Mozilla's new email company, http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/press/mozilla-2007-09-17.html --Michael Dillon _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf