Monday, October 13, 2008

ASCII

ASCII or the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is a limited set of characters and it is used for all kinds of applications. Yesterday I talked about support for multiple languages on the Internet and mentioned that .org domains can be named in multiple scripts.

I was told this was pretty useless because e-mail addresses are one of the uses of the domain name and they are firmly ASCII. Pretty useless because e-mail applications do not allow for e-mail addresses in anything but ASCII. I just checked and my e-mail application does indeed not allow for it.

So my question is, what e-mail applications DO allow for e-mail addresses in multiple scripts and, is it only a problem of the client applications or are there also problems in the infrastructure of the Internet...
Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

Minh Nguyễn said...

Currently, the IETF standard requires ASCII-only e-mail addresses, but there’s a working group assigned to internationalizing the format.