From: Leonid Yegoshin (egoshin@genesyslab.com)
Date: Wed Nov 19 1997 - 15:36:49 CST
Hi,
>From: <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
>
>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.
The idea of using UTF-8 has yet one bad consequence - all draft use MIME
only and I can implement MIME-only software without problems. But if we
insert possibility for UTF-8 for 8-bit group names we should have
an additional task with processing of UTF-8 in news software.
Moreover, it can be another problem if we adopt UTF-8 default:
if some article pass UTF-8 host then newsgroup names CAN be converted
from MIME to UTF-8 by some energetic news manager !
(Especaily if he has UTF-8 compatible local host)
- Leonid Yegoshin, LY22