From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Sun Nov 23 1997 - 07:08:23 CST
In local.usenet Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@innosoft.com> wrote:
>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)
But Newsgroups: is not a legitimate header in mail. It is only defined for
news (RFC1036 and its successor - i.e. what we are now trying to write).
So if a Newsgroups: header does leak into email, then it had better
follow the syntax and semantics that is defined for news. And we will
state categorically that the Newsgroups: line is to be interpreted as
UTF-8. I.e. that is its canonical form - User Agents may (should) display
it in something more acceptable to the user (indeed, UAs should be able to
do the translation both ways).
Now the only common case where Newsgroups: is likely to appear in email is
when submitting stuff to moderators. And our recommendation there will be
for the whole news article to be MIME-encalsulated within the email any
way (is somebody writing this part of the specification BTW - we discussed
it way back).
As to requirements for UAs, we anticipate that not all UAs will be able to
display all character sets. OTOH, readers without Chinese character sets
are unlikely to want to read a newsgroup with a chinese name, so this may
not be a serious problem. However, UAs will have to display SOMETHING when
an undisplayable header arrives. It does not really matter what, so long
as it is unique, and can be translated both ways. In fact, even raw RFC
2047 would do for this purpose. It looks ugly, but it works.
And the great advantage of all this is that it is upwards compatible with
present practice. All present usage goes straight through. And most
relaying software will already handle it.
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------- Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Voice/Fax: +44 161 437 4506 Snail: 5 Clerewood Ave, CHEADLE, SK8 3JU, U.K. PGP: 2C15F1A9 Fingerprint: 73 6D C2 51 93 A0 01 E7 65 E8 64 7E 14 A4 AB A5