ietf-nntp CHARSET in nntp

[John Myers]

I'd certainly like to echo Brian Hernacki's sentiments, plus add some
more information.

Use of UTF-8 is strongly recommended, both by the report of the IAB
Character Set Workshop (RFC 2130) and the proposed IETF Policy on
Character Sets and Languages (draft-alvestrand-charset-policy-01.txt)

Of course, one cannot Just-Send-UTF-8 in an existing deployed
protocol--one needs to negotiate the ability to use anything besides the
existing US-ASCII.  It does, however, simplify things greatly to make
the only charset that can be negotiated be UTF-8.

The approach being taken in other existing protocols, such as IMAP, is
to add a command to negotiate the language of the server-issued
human-readable text (such as error messages).  The extension command is
defined such that negotiation of a language has as a side-effect the
negotiation of UTF-8.  (Put another way, the extension defines that
error messages in the non-default language are encoded in UTF-8).

Extending this to group names and the contents of article headers is
trickier.  I'm not sure what is the right thing to do with group names,
it depends on what the right behavior is when a server is asked to
present a non-ascii group name to a legacy NNTP client.  Article headers
I consider a message format issue, not an NNTP protocol issue.