ietf-nntp Dealing with internationalization in NNTP

[Brian Hernacki]

Now it seems that this conversation has been started a couple of times,
but has never resolved anything. So I'm going to try again. I think it
would be a mistake to expend all this effort to "bring NNTP up-to-date"
and to not solidly deal with localization and internationalization
issues. And I'm not convinced we have done that yet.

A couple of issues I'd like to start with are:

o the charset

The current 977bis draft includes the CHARSET command to allow the
client and server to negotiate a charset. A couple folks (including me)
have posted as to why we think this is a bad idea. I would much rather
see us defined something like UTF8 as the default charset used. While I
heard from people who agreed with me on this, I didn't hear any
objections. Is this OK? Do poeple think this would be a bad thing? If
not should we change the draft?


o a language specification/negotiation extension

While having the charset well known is great, it still doesn't help the
Japanese user who gets error messages popping up in English. What I'd
like to see is something akin to IMAP's LANGUAGE extension. This allows
client and server to negotiate a non-default language to use for things
like error messages, newsgroup descriptions, etc. Thoughts?


--brian