In message <0A69C7DE-D5E2-4B95-9643-82103F87B92B@ripe.net>, Edward Shryane <eshryane@ripe.net> wrote:
Using ISO-8859-1 to encode IDN email addresses in the RIPE database does cause some issues:
We agree on that point, 100%.
- Only a small subset of the UTF-8 character set is supported, characters outside ISO-8859-1 are substituted with a '?' on Whois update.
Yes. And this is really rather entirely sub-optimal.
- ISO-8859-1 encoded email addresses may not be handled properly by Whois clients or mail servers.
I personally am not too concerned about WHOIS client tools. They can adapt or die. :-) It is certainly the case however that most or all existing WHOIS clients do not contain any UTF-8 decoding logic, and that they thus will display only 7-bit US-ASCII or, in some cases that and alo ISO-8859-1 encoded single byte characters. For all of these existing clients & tools it would be maximally convenient to be able to cut-and-paste email addresses out of the WHOIS data base records, as these tools render them, and directly into mail clients. Either a UTF-8 encoding or a punycode encoding (of domain name) -might- possibly work for that. I personally prefer punycode because it is effectively the lowest common denominator. It does not force WHOIS clients or tools to support anything beyond simple and primitive 7-bit US-ASCII, and yet it can still express 100% of all modern IDNs. Regards, rfg