[Ietf-not43] l10n/i18n issues

[Eric A. Hall]

on 2/5/2003 12:28 PM Eric A. Hall wrote:

>     Is a reasonable compromise position that things like
>     contact information MUST be provided in a format which is
>     compliant with international postal regulations? Would
>     that be sufficient? Does anybody know what they are?

Couple of useful links:

  http://www.upu.int/post_code/en/international_addressing.shtml

  http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/postal.html

General consensus is that all elements of an address should be used in the
native language/script of the recipient (the contact person), while the
destination country and zone information should also be provided in a form
which the originator country can handle.

In general then, I would think that the proper policy would be for contact
information to allow any language/charset, with two clarifications. First
is that country data must be tokenized, and second is that the remaining
elements MUST have language identifiers and MUST also pass the necessary
charset information (note that ~"MUST be provided in UTF-8" is a suitable
instance of this). This should allow for localization on the client side.

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/