ietf-nntp Dealing with internationalization in NNTP

Martin J. Dürst mduerst at ifi.unizh.ch
Wed Oct 22 04:38:19 PDT 1997


On Tue, 21 Oct 1997, Brian Hernacki wrote:

> 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.

Very good idea:


> 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?

As far as I understand, this only refers to protocol elements
(parameters) in the NNTP protocol itself, not to the news articles
themselves? I don't have much of an idea of what protocol elements
are used and which of these need or may benefit from internationalization
or localization (by the way, these words can be shortened to i18n
and l10n). Also, I think there is some overlap with usenet, e.g.
in respect to newsgroup names.

I would definitely prefer to use UTF-8 only for these things, but
UTF-8 should be prescribed in a way that doesn't completely
forbid local existing customs. For examlpe, an NNTP server
should not refuse a command with a newsgroup name or something
else just because it does not meet the syntactic constraints
that an UTF-8 octet sequence does.


> 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?

The IMAP model can definitely be used. For more information, please
also see Harald Alvestrand's draft about the IETF charset policy,
which contains quite a few recommendations about this topic (e.g.
default language stuff which can be highly political,...).

Other things I could immagine, at least in theory, are a facility
that a news article can be pasted in various languages, and the NNTP
server only returns one of them based on language preferences
(which might not be the same as those for error messages),
or a facility to specify some localized conventions for sorting
 newsgroups or article subjects on the server prior
to requesting a certain subrange of newsgroups or article subjects (if
such a facility is present currently in NNTP, anyway).
Well, just brainstorming.


Regrads,	Martin.




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