From: Chris Newman (Chris.Newman@innosoft.com)
Date: Fri Nov 21 1997 - 00:34:15 CST
There are two choices for Newsgroup names:
(1) Use UTF-8 only (at least for Newsgroup names in NNTP -- names in the
Newsgroups header probably need to be RFC 2047 for news->mail gateways)
This is simpler on modern operating systems like Windows NT, MacOS 8,
Solaris 2.6, etc. On these systems it can be displayed with a trivial
algorithmic conversion that's in the system library. And this works not
just for the local characters, but for any characters with glyphs in your
current font.
For older operating systems it requires a one-way conversion table to the
localized character set(s). Such tables aren't too bad and many are
publicly available.
(2) Use MIME header encoding (RFC 2047)
This has the advantage that any proper news client has to support this
anyway (unless it is believed possible to force all mail->news gateways
to do the conversion to UTF-8 in headers). For older operating systems,
no conversion is necessary to view the localized character set. It also
allows a graceful transition to UTF-8.
Unfortunately, this is very ugly for non-upgraded clients. In addition,
an international version of a news client will have to support conversion
tables between all international character sets. The best way to keep
these tables small is to use Unicode as an intermediate format -- at which
point there is no savings over (1). If you don't use Unicode as an
intermediate format, then these tables are significantly larger than the
tables in (1). The conversion process is also more complex as some
localized character sets use complex switching algorithms.
When it comes right down to it, I think it's a toss up in this case. I
have a slight bias towards (1) because the software becomes simpler long
term. I think the distinction you're failing to make is the non-obvious
difference between localized software and internationalization support.
Interoperable protocols need to support internationalization, regardless
of what clients do.
- Chris