Earlier quoted context omitted.
QR codes to the rescue!
Doesn't help if someone is dictating it to me.
Um, there's a filled dot. Then an empty one. Then there's like three filled ones. No, four. Then another empty one...
A first step toward more global email
31–40 of 49 posts
Re: A first step toward more global email
#32Out of curiosity, how would I send an email to somebody who's address is in a language I can't type?
Copy & Paste?
Re: A first step toward more global email
#33Does it support emoji?
Re: A first step toward more global email
#34For people who are wondering, the example Japanese email address translates to "takeshi@mail.google" (Takeshi is a male, Japanese first name).
Re: A first step toward more global email
#35What are the security implications? Does anyone know how canonicalization is handled? Does every mail program need to know how to precompose/decompose etc? How do you protect against impersonation using look-alike letters? This is, as far as I know, not yet a solved problem even at the domain name level[0], and it's likely to open a whole new can of worms at the account level. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_hom…
Something like hashing or petnames, maybe.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#36Out of curiosity, how would I send an email to somebody who's address is in a language I can't type?
In addition to copying the address, you can also use a virtual keyboard to map your existing keyboard to the keyboard of another language. I know that OS X has this built in, and I am assuming Windows does too.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#37Does it support emoji?
If it supports all characters defined by the Unicode standard, then it should. However, it wouldn't surprise me if Google blacklists the non-language symbols (like the emoji, shapes, etc.) because it is not within the scope of their goal. You can't read emoji like a word, so it wouldn't work well with the goal of making email addresses readable.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The web is currently broken for not supporting stuff like that. I imagine over half of the world population can't write their name in ASCII only characters, that's pretty inexcusable. Internationalization is here to stay, it's our job as software engineers to support it everywhere.
Your argument would be a lot more useful and falsifiable if you put it in cost-benefit terms. I'm not so convinced that having a few billion people use ASCII approximations is "inexcusable", but at least if you said "the worldwide benefits are worth the implementation costs" that could be wrong or right.
His comment is plenty useful. We've had computers around long enough that one doesn't need to provide a cost-benefit analysis to justify saying "this is stupid". "Check this out, I've got a box that can play movies. It can immerse you in a 3D video environment that you can interact with. You can talk to people thousands of miles away for free. It allows you access to much of the world's knowledge. It can solve numeric problems that would take years to solve by hand."
Re: A first step toward more global email
#39Good luck typing in those characters, or even knowing how to pronounce them if you had a "sounds-like" index.
Re: A first step toward more global email
#40Maybe 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.
Right, that's a legit concern. How about an app that quickly loads up all the language keyboards in the OS and lets you pop into one temporarily for the purposes of typing one thing in notepad or just straight into the clipboard?
> How about an app that quickly loads up all the language
That sounds convenient.
/s