Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rock_artist 7 days ago
> In that sense, it’s actually pretty surprising that so much of the world’s population wasn’t able to put their own name, in its native written form, in an email address until just 14 years ago.

Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it and find the email most likely getting it right.

But email as means of international communication, like passport, should be readable as possible or it kills its purpose.

Even with ASCII emails I have, I already sometimes struggle to pass them over phone or other methods :)
3 comments
mitxela 7 days ago
What if the agreed upon international standard alphabet didn't happen to be the one you natively write with? If the world agreed to write all email addresses in katakana, that would work just as well as ASCII, right? I have to ask this because a lot of people confuse "single international character set" with "single international character set that happens to be my one." If you'd also be okay with katakana, then you're consistent.
link
rock_artist 2 days ago
English nor Latin characters are my native language. My language is also written from right-to-left.

So if it was broadly used and what charset used by a reasonable amount of the population then yeah I’d of course learn it in early age as I had to learn English.

link
swampangel 7 days ago
> Maybe for some internal usages. but imagine someone from a country using different language and characters gives me a card with their email. It's now far less portable for me to use it. Those days, I surely could picture it and find the email most likely getting it right.

It would be more portable for use with their peers who speak the same language, rather than requiring that everyone they want to communicate with in their own language and alphabet understands a second alphabet just for the addressing scheme.

link
account42 7 days ago
Agreed, (a subset of) ASCII as the lingua franca of identifies is very useful. Almost all languages managed pretty well with ASCII-encodings of their special characters even if some individuals choose to be offended.
link