Re: ASCII (Re: draft-allbery-usefor-usepro-00 errata)

["Charles Lindsey" <chl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In <87mz5k50bp.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Russ Allbery <rra@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:


>I think that also describes the same situation, but I prefer the wording
>above.  I think it's clearer and more explicit.

I think we are agreed about the effect to be achieved. But the wording
needs to be such that readers not familiar with the background to this
issue will easily be able to see what it implies. Moreover, if ever we do
go for UTF-8 newsgroup names, then it would be nice to have a wording that
can be adapted, rather than being a complete rewrite.

But I don't think either wordings suggested really works as it stands.


>You only have to require a charset of UTF-8 if you have non-ASCII
>newsgroups; otherwise, anything can be used that satisfies the above
>requirement.  So I don't agree that you would lose backward compatibility.

Ah! So when that happens, existing ASCII newsgroups could continue to use,
say, Iso8859-1 in checkgroups, but any new Utf-8 groups would be
restricted to using UTF-8. Seems slightly weird, but it would work.

BTW, I agree with the suggestion, in another thread, that RECCOMMENDING
(or recommending) UTF-8 at this stage would be a good idea.

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