11–20 of 49 posts
Quick question; when characters appears as blocks on my screen, they can still be copy-pasted, right? I would imagine so since the required font is missing but the data, which is the important part, is still available.
Maybe this is a good thing but I wouldn't have an email address with accented characters (and my name contains two of them). It would be quite awkward if I gave someone my address and he/she couldn't simply type it with his/her default keyboard configuration.
Quick question; when characters appears as blocks on my screen, they can still be copy-pasted, right? I would imagine so since the required font is missing but the data, which is the important part, is still available.
Fist of all, I am quite aware that funny remarks are frowned upon on HN and I agree to this policy. That said, I think that http://www.bash.org/?244321 is still the correct and informative answer.
Interesting. Question: What do you guys think it'd take to get the other N% of email providers, clients, servers, and whatnot onboard? Is this an ipV6-like situation?
Hardly. Almost all email moves between only a handful of companies. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. Between them they dominate the landscape. It only takes a handful of engineers and product managers at these companies to decide "let's do this" and pretty quickly such email addresses can become a reality for at least person to person mail. Of course for them to become usable for signing up to websites, mai…
I am a Dane. We use the latin alphabet plus æ, ø and å. Some names, like Søren or Åse, can't be written in pure ascii, but the people who have these names tend to just have addresses like soren@whatever.dk or soeren@whatever.dk. It seems preposterous for me to risk breaking the web over something so relatively trivial. Heck my name is ascii compatible but it isn't available.
Sure, it's understandable as email is an old and a widely used protocol, so changes are difficult to push through. But it's not acceptable, and it's not "relatively trivial".
There's no risk of "breaking the web", since the web is already broken for billions of people.
If email can't be made to support UTF-8, then email should be replaced altogether.
Quick question; when characters appears as blocks on my screen, they can still be copy-pasted, right? I would imagine so since the required font is missing but the data, which is the important part, is still available.
There's three reasons why text might appear blocked out: corrupt data (we'll ignore this), data in formats the text renderer doesn't "understand," and data in formats it DOES understand but doesn't have the prerequisite fonts to draw.
Typically when it is a lack-of-fonts issue you can copy it back out and paste it elsewhere and it will work fine as the data's consistency is kept.
But when the text renderer literally doesn't understand the underlying data (either because it is misconfigured or doesn't fully support UNICODE), when you try to copy back out you'll often get a corrupted version of the underlying data which cannot be reused (e.g. a 2 byte character treated as two 1 byte characters).
That issue is less and less common in 2014, as MOST text renderers support 2 byte UNICODE characters even if they won't have the fonts to render the full sets. But around the year 2000, it was fairly common to run across a text editor which under-the-hood was just ASCII and it would corrupt irrecoverably UNICODE inputed.
Interesting. Question: What do you guys think it'd take to get the other N% of email providers, clients, servers, and whatnot onboard? Is this an ipV6-like situation?
Hardly. Almost all email moves between only a handful of companies. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. Between them they dominate the landscape. It only takes a handful of engineers and product managers at these companies to decide "let's do this" and pretty quickly such email addresses can become a reality for at least person to person mail. Of course for them to become usable for signing up to websites, mai…
According to the standard: "If the message cannot be forwarded because the next-hop system cannot accept the extension, it MUST be rejected or a non-delivery message MUST be generated and sent."
Google could preserve a backup ASCII email for all UTF-8 email addresses, which would be used in the case the recipient doesn't support SMTPUTF8.
Of course, I don't know if Google has plans to support this.
I am a Dane. We use the latin alphabet plus æ, ø and å. Some names, like Søren or Åse, can't be written in pure ascii, but the people who have these names tend to just have addresses like soren@whatever.dk or soeren@whatever.dk. It seems preposterous for me to risk breaking the web over something so relatively trivial. Heck my name is ascii compatible but it isn't available.
Let's say the Internet had been invented in Japan instead of the US. How would you feel if people told you that you had to write your name in katakana everywhere? As another commenter mentioned, internationalization is here to stay, and if we want to expand to the next few billion users it's even more important. FWIW internationalized usernames are already available on a number of non-email platforms (Weibo as a prime example). For email to remain competitive, it's important to keep up in the internationalization space.
This is very useful for non native english speakers that uses other than latin characters. I have to repeat word by word and check what people wrote when I need to tell my email address. If my address was a word in hebrew, or something people can pronounce and write it would actually help, saving time and avoiding misspellings. But this should be an alias, or it should be very easy to create one, I already have my em…