From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Mon Oct 04 1999 - 16:19:45 CDT
Bill Davidsen (davidsen@prodigy.com) writes:
> Is there really a need for non-ASCII in the newsgroup names?
In the beginning of this year, there was a suggestion for creating
two groups about fitness in the se.* hierachy. The desired names
were se.hälsa.vikt and se.hälsa.motion, "hälsa" being Swedish for
"health". Obviously se.hälsa is not a legal name today. Sometimes
it's possible just to remove the dots, but se.halsa would not be
a good idea, because "halsa" is a word too, meaning "to drink directly
from the bottle". Unlike the Germans, we don't like replacing åäö
with digraphs, and se.haelsa looks pretty ugly to us.
And this is just one example. To be deprived of 3/28th of our alphabet
makes group naming even more difficult than it is already.
>This is not an English centric question, just a recogntion that many,
>perhaps most, admins don't have the tools to handle those groups well.
I reckon that even when our Draft becomes standard, se.* will have to
wait a few more years until we can actually start to use åäö in our
names. But if we never write into the standard, we will never be able to
use it.
And seriously, about not having tools to handle those groups well. In
difference to many other on this list I'm not brain-washed by working in
7-bit Unix for all my life, but grew up in the VMS world which was bascially
8-bit clean already in 1985. I don't feel ashamed say that admins
that don't have tools to handle 8-bit names, should leave the stone
age behind.
> I admit to being a minimalist on standards, I don't like changes unless
> they solve actual problems, and I don't see us being out of group
> namespace and needing uppercase or extended character sets.
You may not be out of group namespace. But the English alphabet is
not sufficient everywhere. Hey, we Swedes are pretty well off. After
all we have 25 out 28 available. That's a few more than they have in
Armenia or India or Japan or Algeria or...
Trust me, we are addressing a real problem here.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se