ietf-nntp NNTP and 16-bit charsets

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl7kzyrlam.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:


>Charles Lindsey <chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:

>>        NOTE: Texts using charsets which represent characters as sequences
>>        of 16 or 32 bits (e.g. UCS-2 and UCS-4) cannot be reliably conveyed
>>        in the above format.

>False.  16-bit or 32-bit character sets that have an encoding that avoids
>NUL, CR, or LF work fine.  Possibly a pedantic point, but it wouldn't
>surprise me if there are legacy Asian character sets with that property.

They may well get it right in the low order byte, but I would be surprised
if they all got it right in the high order byte.

The replies I have had, on this list and the USEFOR list, however, seem to
indicate that all these legacy Asian charsets are encoded into an octet
stream in a manner generally similar to UTF-8, and they all have ASCII as
a subset, so they should not be a problem in practice.

Anyway, I have made my copy read "cannot, in general, be reliably
conveyed". But I have to keep reminding myself that I am not the editor of
this list, so the text is just a suggestion for Stan to act upon, of
course.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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