On Wed, 8 Nov 2017, Mark Svancarek wrote:
If the fonts aren't installed, you may see boxes. That's system-specific and user-specific and app-specific. I agree with you that it's pretty weak circa 2017. You may be right that boxes have been completely eliminated at this point, but I am not sure sure.
At some point, you just lose. If I send you Arabic text and you don't have an Arabic font, unless you plan to do something heroic like send it to a faraway rendering service that returns a png image, what are you going to do?
While true that local parts aren't U-LABELS, and that punycode isn't defined for use outside of U-LABELS, some email services do resort to using ACE-style conversion in the local part as a downgrading technique - I've received them.
That's on the sending end. On the receiving end I don't see any point in inventing faux punycode just for a differently ugly display.
-----Original Message----- From: John R. Levine [mailto:johnl@iecc.com] Sent: Wednesday, November 8, 2017 10:09 AM To: Mark Svancarek <marksv@microsoft.com> Cc: John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>; Don Hollander <don.hollander@icann.org>; Joseph Yee <jyee@afilias.info>; HEALTH Yao <yaojk@cnnic.cn>; Barry Leiba <barryleiba@computer.org>; ua-eai@icann.org Subject: RE: [Ext] EAI Working group Archives
I suspect that a typical non-user of Arabic would find Arabic script more desirable than boxes or punycode. That's something usability folks can test. Personally, if I were expecting an email from an Arabic-scripting colleague, it would make a big difference to me.
In my (mostly non-Microsoft) experience, any system that handles Unicode will show Arabic as Arabic. What it won't do is to handle messy cases like combined roman and Arabic, nor will it have a usable input method. But it shouldn't show boxes.
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