From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Sat Oct 05 2002 - 17:30:18 CDT
"Charles Lindsey" <chl@clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:
> In <3D97AA42.3070308@alex.blilly.com> Bruce Lilly <blilly@erols.com> writes:
> >Erland Sommarskog wrote:
>
> >> Maybe you should trying to understand that raw UTF-8 in newsgroup
> >> names is not something we only made up for fun: it does reflect
> >> actual user requirements.
>
> >I doubt that any significant number of users insisted on UTF-8
> >specifically. ...
>
> Indeed not. They all wanted ISO-8859-1. We had endless discussion in the
> early days of this list to persuade them that only UTF-8 could give the
> required global flexibility.
Nah, I cannot recall anything of that, unless you had the discussions
before I joined the list. (Which I did fairly early on, and what I
could make out not much happened before that. Someone called Vera or
somesuch promised to come up with a draft, but was never heard of a again.)
Basically, we said UTF-8, and I might have made some lame attempts
to get in a backdoor for Latin-1, but I didn't fight desperately
for it, as I realised that it would never make it through customs.
What we all were very much in agreement on was that RFC2047 is a hassle
in general, and for Newsgroups completely impossible. Then over the
years, there has been the occassional guest who have opposed raw UTF-8
and suggested various other schemes. (And =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Claus_F=E4rber?=
did every once in a while suggest some alternative encoding.)
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se