Jiankang Yao writes:
Some readers may still prefer punycode. Can we list some detail reasons for why not?
Perhaps the most important reason is that we have a forty-year history of email addresses being printable and displayable in the same form. Your address is yaojk@cnnic.cn, and that's both the way it's displayed to humans and the way it's used when computers talk protocol to each other. There's a LOT of software that assumes that it can display addresses as written, in every programming language. Some software written in languages for which there is no punycode library available. Some software written in ways which makes it difficult to integrate punycode, even if a library is available. Some software that would be expensive to upgrade (companies like Oracle charge steep fees to upgrade their databases, and old version of Oracle don't support punycode). You might not think that Oracle would need punycode? But it would. And Microsoft Excel too. People make SQL tables or Excel sheets containing tables of names, addresses and phone numbers. If an address is either readable or usable, but not both, then it doesn't go well into those SQL databases or Excel sheets. Arnt