On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 06:47:42PM +0000, linuxa linux <linuxalinux@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 24 lines which said: > .....Due to the ASCII character encoding being the core/monopoly This is a bad start: non-ASCII characters are used on the Internet for many years. There is certainly an ASCII *bias* in many Internet protocols, applications or deployments but if there was an ASCII *monopoly*, it ended a long time ago. > and primarily basis to the internet/web infrastructure As I already told you on the Unicode mailing list, citing the Web is especially bad since HTTP/HTML is certainly one of the Internet protocols/formats which have the best internationalization. > presently you cannot have domain names that are multilingual, for > example: japanese and english language mixed character domain names, > hindi and english language mixed character domain names etc. Since it is an IETF mailing list, I will focus on what depends on IETF, technical standards. There is *nothing* in the current IDN standard (machine names in Unicode) that forbids such mixes. You may refer to bad policies like ICANN IDN Guidelines, which apparently forbid mixing scripts, but this had nothing to do with the IETF, nothing to do with the protocols. > Another example, there is not much browser / URL bar integration and > usability innovation that allow for a non-ASCII language domain name > to stay non-ASCII script on the browser / URL bar without it > changing to Punycode. That's an issue with the software, not with the protocols. Complain to Mozilla (apparently the main culprit), to Microsoft, to Google, not to IETF. > ASCII monopoly Next time you use this concept, I will stop reading. As I said, there is no ASCII monopoly. (You can talk about ASCII bias, if you wish, it is more realistic.) And, to end on an optimistic tone, three new RFCs have been published on friday. They (almost) finalize the standards for the internationalization of email addresses (email content in Unicode is standard since 1992). Soon :-) I'll be able to use stéphane@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the accent. Congratulations for the EAI Working Group. Now, we can say that almost all the IETF standards are Unicode-able. (The main missing one is FTP, which has an option TEXT which is only for ASCII. An Unicode version is under work.) RFC 5335 Title: Internationalized Email Headers Author: Y. Abel, Ed. Status: Experimental Date: September 2008 Mailbox: abelyang@xxxxxxxxxxxx Pages: 14 Characters: 27945 Updates: RFC2045, RFC2822 I-D Tag: draft-ietf-eai-utf8headers-12.txt URL: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5335.txt Full internationalization of electronic mail requires not only the capabilities to transmit non-ASCII content, to encode selected information in specific header fields, and to use non-ASCII characters in envelope addresses. It also requires being able to express those addresses and the information based on them in mail header fields. This document specifies an experimental variant of Internet mail that permits the use of Unicode encoded in UTF-8, rather than ASCII, as the base form for Internet email header field. This form is permitted in transmission only if authorized by an SMTP extension, as specified in an associated specification. This specification Updates section 6.4 of RFC 2045 to conform with the requirements. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This document is a product of the Email Address Internationalization Working Group of the IETF. RFC 5336 Title: SMTP Extension for Internationalized Email Addresses Author: J. Yao, Ed., W. Mao, Ed. Status: Experimental Date: September 2008 Mailbox: yaojk@xxxxxxxx, maowei_ietf@xxxxxxxx Pages: 22 Characters: 48110 Updates: RFC2821, RFC2822, RFC4952 I-D Tag: draft-ietf-eai-smtpext-13.txt URL: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5336.txt This document specifies an SMTP extension for transport and delivery of email messages with internationalized email addresses or header information. Communication with systems that do not implement this specification is specified in another document. This document updates some syntaxes and rules defined in RFC 2821 and RFC 2822, and has some material updating RFC 4952This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This document is a product of the Email Address Internationalization Working Group of the IETF. RFC 5337 Title: Internationalized Delivery Status and Disposition Notifications Author: C. Newman, A. Melnikov, Ed. Status: Experimental Date: September 2008 Mailbox: chris.newman@xxxxxxx, Alexey.Melnikov@xxxxxxxxx Pages: 18 Characters: 36324 Updates: RFC3461, RFC3464, RFC3798 I-D Tag: draft-ietf-eai-dsn-06.txt URL: http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5337.txt Delivery status notifications (DSNs) are critical to the correct operation of an email system. However, the existing Draft Standards (RFC 3461, RFC 3462, RFC 3464) are presently limited to US-ASCII text in the machine-readable portions of the protocol. This specification adds a new address type for international email addresses so an original recipient address with non-US-ASCII characters can be correctly preserved even after downgrading. This also provides updated content return media types for delivery status notifications and message disposition notifications to support use of the new address type. This document experimentally extends RFC 3461, RFC 3464, and RFC 3798. This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community. This document is a product of the Email Address Internationalization Working Group of the IETF. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf