From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar@algonet.se)
Date: Mon Nov 17 1997 - 17:04:03 CST
At my newsserver news.algonet.se there are now two groups with
8-bit chars in the name:
se.test.räksmörgås
se.test.rÁ¤ksmÁ¶rgÁ¥s
The latter is the UTF-8 variant of the former.
So far people have succeded in posted from Unix, Win, OS/2 and Mac.
Not completely smoothly, though. An OS/2 user saw the names garbled,
and couldn't post to the garbled names, but when he typed them
un-garbled it worked.
Jamie may want to explain why Netscape puts quotes around the
names, when you select the group and the click on the New Message. :-)
It only happens with the 8-bit names, not the regular names.
If anyone is interesting in trying this group, drop a line to
Ragnar Lönn (prl@algonet.se) who is the news admin here and he
might give you a feed.
As for the idea of having UTF-8 as the only character set for news-
group names, I tried to get some opinion from swnet.internet.news
as well as a list for Swedish news admins. The thread in s.i.n.
degenerated to a discussion whether we should have 8-bit at all
in names, an issue there certainly is no consensus on.
Put personally I'm more and more for UTF-8, as a long-term solution.
But whether we will actually use UTF-8 *if* we go ahead, remains
to see. It would be nice if there was some support for this in
the RFC, but it should not be strong. Something like:
If newsgroup name contains 8-bit characters that cannot be
interpreted as UTF-8, the reading and posting agetns MAY
interpret the characters in some other character set, for
instance iso-8859-1.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se