From: Martin J. Dürst (mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch)
Date: Wed Nov 19 1997 - 13:36:21 CST
On Mon, 17 Nov 1997, Chris Newman wrote:
> On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Erland Sommarskog wrote:
> > 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.
>
> The IETF policy on character sets effectively requires that all
> text displayed to humans:
> (1) Includes a charset label somewhere
> or (2) Uses UTF-8
>
> Otherwise, there's no international interoperability.
The above text by Erland is on the edge of the IETF policy,
but probably still in. It only defines error behaviour.
It may be extended to saying something about "local networs"
or "consenting parties" or some such. In the work on FTP
internationalization, we had to do this because there was
too much of such practice to be outrightly ignored. Maybe
it's not necessary for news. Mentioning iso-8859-1 as an
examlpe is not the best idea in my eyes; mentionning something
else would make it much clearer that you have no chance of
knowing what it is.
Regards, Martin.