From: Per Abrahamsen (abraham@dina.kvl.dk)
Date: Mon Jul 02 2001 - 06:18:53 CDT
greg andruk <gja@meowing.net> writes:
> On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 11:36:05AM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:
>
>> If we don't do it now, then the Scandinavians will just start using
>> ISO-8859-1, which will be disastrous for the rest of the world. The only
>> reason they have not gone that route already is because we promised them
>> UTF-8. They have a severe problem, and they need a solution NOW
>
> It would be no more or less disastrous for them to create the groups in
> Latin-1 as any other charset. The interoperability problems with
> existing software will be the same, and in the future they may have to
> put up with some renaming.
That's unlikely we'll have to do any renaming. If the USEFOR does not
come up with a working solution to non-English newsgroup names, the
default solution will be to use hiearchy and server specific character
sets. This is existing practice for Cyrillic and Asian users, and
works today on a local level (i.e. a Cyrillic user will see the
Cyrillic newsgroup names displayed correctly, but not the Asian
newsgroup names) with popular software. It can be made work on a
international level using tables that maps servers and hiearchies into
charsets. There is at least one newsreader that implements that today
(Gnus).
If we want any other solution than the default, USEFOR is likely to be
the last chance.