ietf-nntp Re: nntp-extensions Dealing with internationalization in NNTP

Stan Barber sob at academ.com
Tue Oct 21 23:03:29 PDT 1997


> 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?

I don't have any opinion, but I know we must address it to make the ADs 
happy. If someone would put together some specific diffs to the current
document and post them here to deal with this, folks can comment on them
and I can get them in the next draft. There was a gentleman in the
usenet-format group that forwarded some text from one of their drafts that
looked pretty good to me, but I don't recall seeing any comments on that 
from anyone. Did anyone besides me see it?

> 
> 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?

I think this is a great candidate for an extension. I don't know that it
is required in the basic specification. 
-- 
Stan   | Academ Consulting Services        |internet: sob at academ.com
Olan   | For more info on academ, see this |uucp: {mcsun|amdahl}!academ!sob
Barber | URL- http://www.academ.com/academ |Opinions expressed are only mine.



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