Re: [EAI] mailto: was RE: Rechartering

[Shawn Steele <[e-mail]>]

> And I don't know what you are suggesting.

I'm saying that for mailto: there are 2 possibilities with the current draft:

1) If I fear clients don't understand EAI, then I use the ASCII local part, in which case, yes, EAI is irrelevant.
2) If I don't think they understand EAI, then I use the Unicode locale part.

The 3rd option: Provide both (downgrade), is useless.  If my client isn't updated to support 2), then its as bad as only providing Unicode (except in a few cases where some intermediate server must downgrade, which is likely rare in practice).

Long-term, 2) is sufficient as most users should become EAI aware.  As a transition period I think that 1 + 2 is sufficient for EAI.

> And that is precisely one of the arguments why downgrading on
> the fly and mid-network is not likely to be useful enough to be
> worth all the trouble, extra syntax, etc.

It's useful in the limited place where I send mail from an EAI aware server to an unaware system.  In that case the mail will still make it and I'll still get a reply.  So I think downgrade is interesting for UTF8SMTP (the 95% case), and other places are pretty uninteresting.

>> So to me, the <Unicode <ASCII>> syntax is mostly interesting
>> merely to populate my address book with both addresses.

>And, depending on how your address book is designed --a topic
>_far_ outside the scope of the WG-- a better way might be
>something isomorphic with
 >  <email>Unicode</email>
 >  <alt-email>ASCII</alt-email>
>or
>   <email>Unicode <alt>ASCII</alt></email>
>saving a lot of parsing aggravation when the addresses are
>needed, _especially_ if the downgrade point is the originating
>system.

I said I didn't think the current mailto: downgrade stuff was helpful :)

> Complete, yes.   Reasonably guaranteed to work, no.  And it does
> suggest another case that might be worth considering, which is
> permitting downgrade syntax and logic only for backward-pointing
> addresses (MAIL, "From:", "Sender:", "Reply-to:") but not
> forward-pointing ones (RCPT, "To:", etc.)

That makes sense

> I think we agree although I'd like to push back mildly on even
> the backward-pointing addresses just because of the costs of
> dealing with the new syntax at all.

That makes sense too, just drop the Unicode addresses and use the downgraded ones?  It'd certainly be simpler, and replies would still go back to the sender.  When the recipient's side was upgraded, then they could get the Unicode address, and it wouldn't really be helpful 'til then anyway.

> I could probably live with this, but want to see the outcome of
> more testing.

More testing is always good.  My fear is that China is basically headed this way anyway, so it seems that we're on track to end up here anyway, for better or for worse.

-Shawn