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10 Jul 2011
In our last installment we discussed MIME,
Unicode and UTF-8, and IDNA, three things that have brought the Internet
and e-mail out of the ASCII and English only era and closer to fully
handling all languages. Today we'll look at the surprisingly difficult
problems involved in fixing the last bit, internationalized e-mail
addresses.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n2.html
In our last
installments we discussed the various ways to
encode non-ASCII character sets, of which UTF-8 is the winner, and some complex
approaches that tried to make UTF-8 mail backward compatible with ASCII mail.
After years of experiments, the perhaps surprising consensus is that if you're
going to do international mail, you just do it.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n3.html
08 Jul 2011
Back when the Internet was young and servers came with shovels (for
the coal), everyone on the net spoke English, and all the e-mail was in
English.
To represent text in a computer, each character needs to have a numeric
code. The most common code set was (and is) ASCII, which is basically
the codes used by the cheap, reliable Teletype printing
terminals everyone used as their computer consoles.
ASCII is a seven bit character code, code values 0 through 127,
and it includes upper and lower case letters
and a reasonable selection
of punctuation adequate for written English. It also includes some obscure
characters, such as @ which was chosen for the middle of e-mail addresses
in part because it was on the ASCII keyboard and otherwise not much used.
But nearly every other written language requires characters outside the
ASCII set. On the modern Internet, mail users live in every country in
the world and write in a vast array of languages, and e-mail has been slowly
evolving to handle everyone else's language.
In today's note I'll describe the changes already made to Internet mail
to handle other languages, and in the next message I'll describe the work
in progress to handle the last missing parts.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Email/i18n.html
04 Jul 2011
In a previous message we looked at
the question of how hard it will be to get IPv4 address space once the
original supply runs out. Today we'll look at the other end of the
question, how much v4 address space do people really need?
The end to end principle says, more or less, that all computers
on the Internet are in principle the same, any of them can be a
server, any can be a client, and the Net should just be a dumb pipe
between them, allowing people to invent new applications without
having to get permission from, or even notify anyone in between.
While this idea has great appeal, for consumers Internet connections,
it's much more common to have several kinks in the pipe.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/v6incor2.html
Every packet of data sent over the Internet is sent from one IP address
to another. The IP addresses in the Internet serve somewhat the same
function as phone numbers in the US phone system, fixed length numeric
identifiers where the first part tells
what network the address is on. Since the dawn of the Internet in the
early 1980s, the IP addresses in use have been IPv4, 32 bit addresses
which means there are about 4 billion of them.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've doubtless seen reports
that the supply of IPv4 addresses is running out. Earlier this month
IANA, the master allocation authority, handed out
the last so-called /8, a large chunk of 16 million
addresses, to one of the regional address
registries, and sometime months or perhaps a few years after that,
the registries will hand out the last pieces of their chunks.
Then what?
The conventional wisdom is that everyone needs to support IPv6, a mostly
compatible upgrade to IPv4 with much larger addresses, by the time the
v4 space runs out. But I'm not so sure, particularly for e-mail.
See more ...
Stable link is https://jl.ly/Internet/v6incor.html
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