Subject: Re: [EAI] Internationalized email addresses in vCard 4.0

From: Shawn Steele <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2010 07:10:44 +0000

>> I would expect
>> e-mail addresses to be composed of characters, not sequences of bytes.)

Certainly we think of the email addresses being composed of Unicode characters, however UTF-8 is explicity 1-4 bytes per character, and EAI is thinking primarily about the bytes on the wire, not the characters that those bytes represent.  (And the IETF loves to think of those as octets rather than bytes.)

For example, any Windows API would probably take "WCHAR" UTF-16 strings, and then do the right thing so that when it finally shows up "on the wire" it'd be in the UTF-8 bytes. 

There isn't a specific address-only RFC, so you'd have to refer to the appropriate part of the relevent document that contains EAI addresses.  Like 4.4 of rfc5335bis.

-Shawn