From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 22 2002 - 09:16:51 CDT
Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> This is not a question of what people are "willing to implement", but
> what happens when there is no communication between developers and users
> of technology, as is the case between client authors (developers) and
> news administrators (users).
Perhaps. I think that's certainly one underlying problem. However, there
are also a number of other ones.
One of the problems, in my opinion, is that the people who are writing
specifications for a solution are still pretending that news is somehow
different than mail, whereas the clients that the vast majority of Usenet
readers are using have nearly eliminated the distinction. This doesn't
mean they can't handle 8-bit characters; by and large they can, in both
mail and news. This is a broader point about a mindset. The client
authors are mostly treating news as read-only mail messages retrieved via
a different protocol, but the people writing news standards are ignoring
them. Obviously, that creates a disconnect.
Another problem is that the issue is fundamentally hard, and fundamentally
hard protocol issues require that someone sit down and do a lot of hard
work in writing code. I expect that some IETF working group will continue
debating all of this ad nauseum until someone actually implements a
solution that works, and likely for at least a year afterwards. For those
of you who want that solution to be UTF-8, I encourage you to start
writing the code, because the code will decide.
Those of you who participate in national hierarchies where this is really
important have an excellent testing bed to start working on a solution,
much better than the rest of us do. You have a limited audience, often on
a reasonably defined set of servers, you can determine the major clients
the local users are using to read news, and you can try things locally
without requiring anyone else's approval.
> The only way to break this spiral of inadequacy would be to define some
> standard. It can only be done by a single dominant player (that is,
> Microsoft), or a de-jure standard body (that is, USEFOR).
To be blunt about it, USEFOR isn't a de jure standards body for Usenet,
nor is the IETF in general. It never established itself as such for NNTP,
where the standard has only passing resemblence to how things work, and it
lost that position for the article format when RFC 1036 went un-updated
for so long.
I do think that if someone comes up with something that's both simple and
mail-compatible, the dominant players will be happy to adopt it as part of
their overall internationalization efforts. Frankly, in a lot of ways
Microsoft cares more about internationalization than the IETF does; while
we have difficulty finding any non-American, non-Western European to
participate in these working groups, Microsoft has a ton of paying
customers who don't fall within those regions.
> Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn't care, and USEFOR consists of Usenet
> kooks, to happy to discuss to ever agree on anything. So it is not
> going to happen.
Sometimes I wish I used a language that wasn't representable in ASCII.
This is a problem well worth solving that I'd love to see solved, but it
doesn't scratch any of my personal itches and I don't know nearly enough
about what the user experience is like for someone whose language isn't
representable in ASCII to make informed decisions about the best way to
proceed.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>