From: Charles Lindsey (chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Jul 10 2001 - 06:00:27 CDT
In <3B4965D2.BAA7FF58@certplus.com> Jean-Marc Desperrier <jean-marc.desperrier@certplus.com> writes:
>> I have brought this up every now and then, but only gotten truly
>> moronic answers. One was that Swedish characters was causing damage
>> to Usenet.
Which is true to the extent that only US-ASCII is permitted by the current
rules. Clearly this needs to change.
>Why do you think the current requirement of USEFOR, "send 8 bit headers as
>unicode" will help this ?
>The true problem is not that the newsreader changes to MIME, but that it
>doesn't know what charset the subject line is in.
But under the new rules, it will know _exactly_ what charset it is in -
namely UTF-8. Indeed, this will need support from newsreaders, but for
those which currently support ISO-8859-1 that is little problem, because
the translation between ISO-8859-1 is trivial. Those writing newsreaders
for China will have to try a little harder, but that is going to be true
under any scheme.
>In USEFOR, it will be required to change it to unicode, so it will take the
>unknown charset, assume it is some known charset, and convert that known
>charset to unicode, therefore destructing the title.
That sounds like a description of a broken newsreader to me :-( .
-- Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------ Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl Email: chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk 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