There's no "I" in IDN, part 16: It's a good thing they decided to call it EAI!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/04/19 07:01 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/04/19/10412471.aspx

Previous blogs in this series:

• part 15: Still no 'I' in EAI.... but we could use an US sometime soon!
• part 14: It turns out there's no 'I' in IE, either
• part 13: Desktop and Managed and Metro; oh my!
• part 12: Emoji + IDN == U+1F4A9 (PILE OF POO)
• part 11: There's no place like ::1, not even 127.0.0.1!
• part 10: Who needs IDN support? How much? When? (Part 2)
• part 9: Who needs IDN support? How much? When? (Part 1)
• part 8: Punycode don't do the PUA
• part 7: IDN comes to AdWords 
• part 6: It isn't like there's an "I" in EAI, either!
• part 5: Stephen Colbert's job is not in any jeopardy
• part 4: the 'path' to Hell is paved with IDN bugs
• part 3: There's no 'I' in DIY, either!
• part 2: Try not to use the wrong functions!
• part 1: If you're not Unicode, you're just wrong!

Sometimes in technology we decide to use a word or phrase that isn't very helpful or intuitive on its own.

But then, right as the onlookers seem baffled, you explain it in an easy, intuitive way.

Usually, they're so relieved to understand what's going on that they don't shift into a "why didn't you just call it that in the first place?" :-)

Like the way Windows and the .NET Framework use the word Ordinal, something I've mentioned before.

Tell them to use an Ordinal function like CompareStringOrdinal, they look confused, so you say "its a Binary sort."

Problem solved!

Anyway, now to explain how EAI fits in here.

people: What are you working on?
me:        EAI.
people: Huh?
me:        Email Address Internationalization.
people: Huh?
me:        You know, Internationalized email. with Unicode characters in the email addresses, etc.
people: Oh, cool! How's it going?

Calling it EAI kept terms like "International email domains" where they belong.

With the professionals who install, maintain, and support them!

Even so, we still get fooled sometimes....

A couple of days ago and yesterday, several people were passing around an article quite excitedly.

The article was: Outlook.com to support 32 new international domains and alias sign in

The excitement! Outlook.com supports EAI!

Well.

Not exactly.

The Outlook Blog, which was that article's cited source, much more accurately explained it in Outlook.com gets two-step verification, sign-in by alias and new international domains.

 They even included a table of the new domains, which I now steal for you:

Cool, to be sure. But that ain't EAI....

John Cowan on 19 Apr 2013 11:55 AM:

Michael S. Kaplan on 19 Apr 2013 5:57 PM:

cheong00 on 22 Apr 2013 8:09 PM:

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